No, I was talking about the shared infrastructure. SMTP, DNS, ICANN, things like that require a level of cooperation and shared investment in the whole thing working well, not really because anyone's going to "win" the business game by running it to their particular advantage. That's a very alien way of thinking on the modern internet. The equivalent today would be something like massive publicly available caching web proxies that anyone could use as a big reverse-CDN to speed up their web access that were just kind of provided to everyone, government-funded, just sitting out there as a public resource. You know, like communism.

I've heard network engineers say they had a lot of trouble talking to their bosses about "peering" (setting up routes between two ISPs that happen to have operations close to each other, so they can hand traffic off to each other if it'd be more efficient to use the other guy's routes and both networks get more efficient to operate). They said they had a lot of trouble explaining the concept to the business people. They pay us for service? Fine. We pay them for service? Fine. We provide service to each other and both of us benefit without any money being involved? Plt... bzzt... I give up, I don't get it. Who gets paid? Why do we do this?

They've lost sight of the idea that it's a good thing to set up the world in a nice well working way (for everyone, including yourself), and just focused on how they can make their check bigger even if there's no point, or even if everything gets worse as a result.