Very interesting debate... let's look back in time to the turn of the century, when our fair city had several competing phone companies. The largest, AT&T, drove the rest out of business by refusing to connect to them. Hence they became a monopoly and claimed that it was "natural" for the phone company to be a monopoly. The "natural monopoly" lasted until fairly recently, when the government broke it up. I think that the Internet could well face the same set of issues. In particular if, say MCInet became convincingly dominant, they could easily put the rest of you guys out of business by refusing to connect you. I think that the only thing that can prevent the Internet following the same course as the telephone network is government anti-trust regulation, which I would hope to see, since I value free competition. -- Walt -------