To those of "authority", single-point-of-failure equates to "centralized control". With the word control in large neon capital letters. Dave Hilton Staff System Administrator entelos(r) Foster City, CA "Notice: I tend to become apprehensive when my position in the food chain becomes ambiguous." -----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Erik Parker Sent: Tuesday, August 31, 2004 12:07 PM To: Simon Waters Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: Senator Diane Feinstein Wants to know about the Benefits of P2P -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1

Surely the big benefits of peer to peer is it takes control way from the center - which will never go down well in Washington when the big Digital Publishers are being so successful at pushing through legislation via WIPO etc.

If they want to start back pedaling, perhaps we should switch to a star physical topology instead of mesh.. put the center of the star dead center in Washington where they can baby sit, run a petabit Carnivore system on it, and let corporations with enough money have their weight put on how things are run. After all.. it is bad design typically to use a star topology for physical networks.. because of one huge single point of failure.. P2P is the ultimate mesh protocol to run on the global mesh network. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iD8DBQFBNMx1xBpDNCKu9WMRAmf6AJsEH1HL7++I5i8nvR4XaP1IlExqQwCgj8wJ C188jcskO0knEdC/YD/KZUk= =lgiU -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----