the.com/interconnection
The invisible handshake between networks that lets your email reach someone else's inbox at all.
means The linking together of separate systems or networks so they can exchange traffic and function as one.
from A straightforward 19th-century compound: 'inter-' (Latin, 'between, among') plus 'connection' (from Latin 'connectere,' 'to bind together'). No hidden story here — it's built exactly like it sounds, assembled as industrial-age English needed words for railways, telegraphs, and later telephone networks that had to be joined to work across providers.
- origin
- Born from telecom antitrust fights in the 1970s-80s
- economics
- Often priced in milliseconds and peering disputes, not dollars
- irony
- Competitors must cooperate for the internet to function
- hidden cost
- Data centers charge rent just to plug cables together