The continuing saga of Internet connectivity is chipping away at a well-intentioned vestige designed to keep accessibility to the Net squarely in the public domain.

It remains to be seen whether the industry can self-regulate and if public peering will survive.

The NSF helped to create NAPs. It lured service providers to connect to these access points by making participation mandatory for ISPs signing government contracts.

Congestion turned many ISPs away from public peering and toward private alternatives. With private peering, traffic typically is still exchanged for free, but rather than connecting at a public exchange, two ISPs instead connect their routers at other points in the network.

A widening gulf soon developed between public and private peering.

Some charge that the dominant backbone providers -- UUNet, Sprint and Cable & Wireless -- have used peering to retain what amounts to an oligopoly.

"Both the private peering and the public peering points have grown in parallel. Quite simply, that's the bandwidth explosion we continue to see."

The fray over peering - or for some, the lack of it - is spurring new ventures that fill the void in Internet connectivity.

"The money will flow into providers that can solve [the BGP] problem."

"We're trying to get away from the current peering and transit model," says Level 3.

"The only way for the Internet to survive is with public peering," says AboveNet.

Tom Nolle believes one of two things will happen. "One, we're going to build what I call a shadow Internet." The other possibility is that the industry will see some regulation in the Internet space, Nolle explains. "If one of those two things doesn't happen, the Internet will crash eventually."

Says PSI: "Our primary strategy for growing our backbone is through the acquisition of capacity. We do this to reduce costs."