Matthew Petach wrote:
*sigh*
Fine, fine, y'all are super-attached to your business-y definitions of ISP.
I'll clarify my earlier point to eliminate this confusion.
To the core of the internet, if you do not have an AS number, you do not exist. If your business does not have an AS number *as far as the BGP speaking core of the internet is concerned, there is no representation for your entity, no matter what acronym you attach to it.*
There. Confusion over. You can call yourself an ISP until you're blue in the face, for all the good it does you; the incontrovertible point I'm making is that you don't exist as a recognizably separate entity from your upstream provider from the network perspective.
For a lot of folks, "business-y definitions" actually matter. People write checks and send bills, to business entities, not AS numbers. Business entities get sued, taxed, and regulated - not AS numbers. And, for the record, it's pretty widely acknowledge that "The World" (Barry Shein) was the world's first commercial ISP - offering shell access in 1989, and at some point started offering PPP dial-up services. As I recall, they were a UUnet POP. -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra