And here you were worried about peer-to-peer leading to the downfall of western civilization (at least that's what the RIAA and MPAA would lead you to believe). Well, it turns out what you really need to worry about is "peering" agreements between the previously unknown (to most people) companies like Cogent and Level 3. These are the guys who run the big fat pipes of the Internet. It turns out that many of them have what are called "peering" agreements wherein they establish direct network connections between them with no money changing hands. In theory their customers get better service (faster network connection, not having to weave through the rest of the network), and simplified architecture.

This is all well and good until one of the peering partners decides that it is a lot bigger than the other one, and the relationship is no longer even. At that point, the big fish will charge the little fish money for the direct connection (just like you paying your ISP for your connection). But the little fish might disagree about the size differential, and a pissing match begins. Then somebody gets cranky and they pull the direct plug. What happens then? Customers can't reach certain other customers. In theory the interconnectedness of the web can get around this, but for many customers they only have a single providor, who only has a single providor, and if the main connection is cut, they are out of luck at least for access to certain other ISPs.

The big question is will the gov get involved in this? Can we (royal we) afford net outages caused by providors getting cranky about handshake agreements? The companies are saying, "we'll deal with it," but I'm willing to bet that they don't have long before somebody steps in. Likely for the worse, but the net has an interest capacity for overcoming technical *and* policy issues. More will be revealed...