On Wed, 19 April 2000, Jeff Barrows wrote:
...such relationships are not always 'transferrable,' and one should evaluate any existing contractual agreements regarding said relationships before making such assumptions.
And since those relationships are covered by NDA, you can't evaluate such existing contractual agreements, .... If you want to spread Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt; it isn't always clear companies actually complete the "transfer" of the peering agreements when they buy, merge, or spin-off different parts of themselves. I hate to be the one who has to figure out the status of a Worldcom, Cable&Wireless or Genuity agreement as they passed through several mergers, spin-offs, name changes, change of control, etc. I wonder what happens to all of Sprint's peering agreements if they are bought by Worldcom or spun-off as a separate company. It would be very amusing to watch the Sprint folks run around NANOG trying to get back the few peering agreements they had because the agreements terminated because the company was sold. After watching what happened with the InternetMCI spin-off, I wouldn't be surprised the DOJ is watching how "transfers" happen. Will Sprint still be a "tier 1" provider? Its amazing the net works at all. The reality is I think it would be very unusual if UUNET terminated Genuity's or Sprint's peering agreement just because the ownership changed. If UUNET wouldn't do it in the case of those cases, they would have a difficult time explaining to DOJ why they would terminated a different provider's peering agreement if its ownership changed. So even though Jeff's statement is technically true, I don't think it is very practical.