Speaking to people in Washington prior to AoIR, I also heard about the international net charging saga. At least from the perspective of DC bureaucrats, the attempt to change the charging to more 'equitably' represent the rest of the world's view was run by Australia's main telecommunications company Telstra. The USA took a very dim view of this; the view in DC is that it was motivated purely by commercial self-interest from Telstra, rather than any desire to pursue reforms that might benefit customers. It is also worth considering the way in which ISPs cooperate to save money by peering and caching, trying to limit the number of requests for information that have to be sent overseas, rather than being handled locally. Matt