Perhaps a dozen or more august technical agencies and private operators have been disadvantaged by this distortion of market via refusal to carry bi-directional traffic. And in the last analysis, if you consider carefully, it is not the actual ecommerce network or competitive VAN that is merely overcharged, squeezed out, shmooshed down, what have you, it is the customers they serve that are disadvantaged. And the DOJ has come to understand this problem quite well after hours of collecting industry opinion from a very diverse corpus of competitive VAN operators.

If a customer selects a certain competitive ecommerce communications provider due to whatever technical advantages this network may hold for them, and said network is either a) cut out of the possibility of delivering traffic to GXS QIDs, or b) charged outrageous rates for interconnection carriage, or c) made to act as retail customer, then the client and the network are disadvantaged. These acts not only harm the obvious party, but it causes a sinister forced migration of clients from the innovators to the technically laggard but numerically and economically larger operator. Such wars have been fought and settled long ago in the internet peering jungle and telecom termination business.

Not one of the disadvantaged networks that make up a part of the collected case against GXS – as private complainants, as a class, and as contributors to the DOJ’s regulatory case, care about GXS and Inovis sallying forth and making hay with B2B integration software and VAN services. None of these fine companies has any illusion that the merger will be stayed. However, as a group, we have asked that limitations of behavior be placed on the merged parties viz. Interconnection policies, settlements, and participation in standards that will assist the VAN industry’s healthy evolution.

For in the present case, it is a sign of a very unhealthy and most likely ailing industry where the leaders feel they have to distort the playing field by such practices. Had this been the case in the formative years of the post ARPANET days, we would have a very stunted internet industry.

As we speak here, in the very real present, many of the enterprise 2.0 leaders, some with millions of subscribers, are seeking to establish alternative ways of sending commerce data. Some still like the lightweight services some x12 centric VANs offer, but it is safe to say that if these issues of cooperation between ALL VANs do not get ironed out and brought into the light, we are in for a clash.

For those wishing to see a draft of the proposed remedies offered as limiting conditions of the GSX Inovis merger, drop me line. Cooperate dear colleagues, exchange data in an open and professional manner, evolve your interoperation standards, culture directory services and automated routing, canonical document standards, and better APIs – then the VAN industry will grow and proper up and down the value curve. In such a world, the GXS giants and the specialized smaller operators all win.