What's really needed is a routing slot market

Sun Feb 6 21:16:44 UTC 2011

>> What's really needed is seperate the routing slot market from the
>> address allocation market.

>Bingo! In fact, having an efficient market for obtaining routing of a
>given prefix, combined with IPv6 vast identifier space, could
>actually satisfy the primary goals that we hold for a long-term
>scalable address architecture, and enable doing it in a highly
>distributed, automatable fashion

This is not unlike the oft made comment that if you could just charge
a fraction of a cent for every mail message, there would be no spam
problem.  They're both bad ideas that just won't go away.

Here's some thought experiments:

1) You get a note from the owner of jidaw.com, a large ISP in Nigeria,
telling you that they have two defaultless routers so they'd like a
share of the route fees.  Due to the well known fraud problem in
Nigeria, please pay them into the company's account in the Channel
Islands.  What do you do?  (Helpful hint: there are plenty of
legitimate reasons for non-residents to have accounts in the Channel
Islands.  I have a few.)

2) Google says here's our routes, we won't be paying anything.  What
do you do?

2a) If you insist no pay, no route, what do you tell your users when
they call and complain?

2b) If you make a special case for Google, what do you do when Yahoo,
AOL, and Baidu do the same thing?

I can imagine some technical backpressure, particularly against networks
that don't aggregate their routes, but money?  Forget about it, unless
perhaps you want to mix them into the peering/transit negotiations.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly