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

From: Eric Brunner <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 06 Jul 2000 13:30:02 -0400

The Swedish legal definition (Patrik provided the pointer) may not be the
only one which attempts to define what "Internet" is, fixed or broken, er,
"mobile".

Anyone else with a normative legal reference, your favorite jurisdiction or
someone else's, please drop me a line. I'll summarize to the list.

Eric

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From: Craig Simon <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 08 Jul 2000 01:43:41 -0400

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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From: Lyman Chapin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 9 Jul 2000 21:15:19 -0400

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:
>-
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