On Fri, 25 Oct 1996, Michael Dillon wrote:
There is a name for this ridiculous style of argument, but I don't remember it ...
Xenophobia. Look it up.
Ah, yes, that's it ;-)
Europe heavily subsidizes the US Internet. It's not just VBCnet: the European Internet community pays something like 90% of the costs of traffic between Europe and North America. The same applies to the rest of the world.
I would say that if transatlantic lines are mostly ordered and paid for by European companies that you are probably correct. But part of the reason is that European government run PTT's charge horrendously high rates for international circuits.
European ISPs routinely put in (very expensive) lines to other European countries and the USA. We have a line to California, and are just now putting in circuits to Stockholm, Amsterdam, and Virginia. This is just normal; we peer with two German networks and one Dutch network in London, where they have run lines over to the UK. On the other hand I have not seen any US regional ISP put in a line to Europe. The few US ISPs (Sprint, UUnet, PSI) that do have lines to Europe use them to sell bandwidth to the States.
Remember when Europe's economy was subsidized heavily by its colonies? The Internet is a similar colonial economy and it can't last forever.
Precisely. -- Jim Dixon VBCnet GB Ltd +44 117 929 1316 fax +44 117 927 2015 http://www.uk.vbc.net VBCnet West +1 408 971 2682 fax +1 408 971 2684