To me the RARE OU is a closed shop of people working for a set of R&D networking interested parties, and they should be as long as they do their job. This does not reflect a bit the real situation of the issues that is at hand, many international and regional serviceproviders (non-R&D) must be able to interwork in the Internet. The openness reflected in EBONE and the method of work in RIPE is as a model the only way forward. ..... The funny (actually sad) fact is that the CEC model is just to blunt and inefficiant. It is almost contradictory to the goals they say they have - to propomte a IT-industry. You can't create a market by "giving a network" for three years, then hope that a market is created and teh the market will be selfsupporting. This is especially true if the "market" consits of state funded users only, what you get is just a higher taxpayers cost to civer the new costs. Back in 1988 I participated in a working group called "RARE Working Party A" (WPA) whose task was to come up with a proposal for the Cosine Policy Group for a common infrastructure - by then we were only thinking of X.25. On one of the last sessions the chairman (from RARE) came up with uninvited (by the working group, only on personal initiative of the chairman) people who were representing a new body "MDNS" (Managed Data Network Services), supposedly an initiative of the European PTT's, but in fact an initiative of the Dutch PTT. It became rapidly clear that MDNS would be the only acceptable solution, strongly backed by RARE and the CEC representative in the working group. Under pressure of the other participants (amongst others EARN, HEPNET and EUnet) a second option was entered in the final proposal: an infrastructure shared, financed and to be managed by the participants, and built on (through upgrading of) the existing infrastructure, to make it highly cost-effective. As could be predicted, the Cosine Policy Group chose for the "RARE & CEC option". But since MDNS died a silent death in the meantime, this was what led to ridiculously expensive (compared to the shared links and shared management model) IXI adventure. The RARE OU initiative clearly shows that history is repeating itself... and openness is still a curse to the RARE politico's. Added to the WPA final proposal was an Annex written by undersigned on behalf of EUnet. The proposal for a backbone structure in this annex bears a striking resemblance with the Ebone as we know it today, the only difference being the location of the UK hub. In 4 years the world hasn't changed much... Piet