My life would be different if I had made a decision some time ago to go off and do something else, or handed this job off to someone else and just done computer research. But I didn't, and here we are. I think they called me the closest thing to a God of the Internet. The Internet works because a lot of people cooperate to do things together. It is an interesting environment.
Service providers are big companies competing like crazy to get customers.
But they don't have anything to sell unless they cooperate to make sure the data gets transferred to wherever the end-customer happens to be. It wouldn't work if they didn't use unique addresses and didn't cooperate. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Internet is in danger of fraying because a decentralized domain name assignment process threatens to introduce chaos and duplication into the network. You're referring to the domain names controversy. The Domain Name System works at several levels.