Chinese bgp metering story

Nick Hilliard nick at foobar.org
Fri Dec 18 19:03:37 UTC 2009


On 18/12/2009 18:19, Joly MacFie wrote:
> I have posted sa comment on this from ISOC England on
> http://www.isoc-ny.org/p2/?p=134
> 
> Please feel free to add comments there.

I tried to read this article earlier today, but my lolwut meter exploded.

It's not really clear whether the confusion in this article is caused by
poor understanding on the part of the journalist, the ITU, the European
Commission, the UK parliament or China.  What is clear is that the article
makes very little sense, other than to note that both China and the ITU
like the idea of billing for bits at national borders.

China, being the sort of state that it is, is perfectly welcome to impose
restrictions like metering for traffic and imposing billing regimes on
international players.  The net result of this will probably be to trash
China's network international connectivity, as the rest of the world mouths
a collective "whatever, dude..." and then goes back to reading their less
spamful inbox.

The ITU, for its part, seems to be involved in a desperate bid to make
itself relevant to the internet world - an ironic position, considering
they did their level best to squat on the internet in the early 90s and
ignore it in the late 90s and early noughties.  Part of this desperation is
manifesting itself as a movement by a number of countries to introduce
international tariffing of internet bits and bytes at country borders.  For
some reason, this peculiar notion appears to make sense to governments and
national telcos - presumably because that's how it works in the PSTN world.
 If all you have is a nail, everything looks like a hammer.

This isn't the only irrelevant absurdity being proposed by the ITU just
now.  If you really want to have a good belly laugh at the level of
misunderstanding by the ITU of how the internet actually works, just take a
look at this document, which followed ITU Resolution 64:

http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-t/oth/3B/02/T3B020000020002PDFE.pdf

In the mean-time, I am refilling my lolwut meter with a quadruple supply of
"wtf"s, in preparation for the ITU's next move.

There's a more serious aspect to this; the ITU is largely irrelevant to the
Internet, and their actions indicate that they strongly resent this.  And
there is nothing more dangerous than a well-funded bureaucracy which
realises that it is now - to all intents and purposes - irrelevant.

Nick




More information about the NANOG mailing list