Re: Defining "Internet" (or "internet")

[Lyman Chapin <[e-mail]>]

Craig,

 From RFC 1287:

"If I could PING you, and you could PING me, then we were both on the 
Internet, and a satisfying working definition of the Internet could 
be constructed as a roughly transitive closure of IP-speaking 
systems. This model of the Internet was simple, uniform, and - 
perhaps most important - testable. The IP-connectivity model clearly 
distinguished systems that were "on the Internet" from those that 
were not."

In the same RFC, we proposed a different answer to your "what *IS* 
the Internet?" question, based not on IP (network address) 
connectivity but on the shared domain name space managed by DNS - 
"the Internet" consists of entities nameable within the DNS, however 
they may be interconnected by underlying networks.

- Lyman

At 1:43 AM -0400 7/8/00, Craig Simon wrote:
>Eric Brunner wrote:
>  > Anyone else with a normative legal reference, your favorite
>...
>
>I saw this in someone's sig line.
>
>But what *IS* the internet?
>
>It's the largest equivalence class in the reflexive transitive symmetric
>closure of the relationship "can be reached by an IP packet from".
>--Seth Breidbart
>
>
>cls
>
>-
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