Joel,
Different doesn't generally mean good, in the peering case.
There are plenty of examples of monopoly PTTs or regulators engaging in
behavior that impacts the usability of or availability of traffic exchange,
there's all sorts of market failures, and there's deliberately uncompetitive
practices from some of the participants. so when we look at the diversity of
experience for network operators not all the diversity is a happy place.
I agree, of course. And the Internet community needs to work on getting to a
better situation where such breakage exists. (My point on the diversity thread
was that it is good to understand what the situations are in the world, not
that those situations themselves are necessarily always good…)
Jari