Inter-provider relations

Thu Oct 24 23:07:37 UTC 1996

> Not that I agree at all with AGIS's new stance on peering and market
> domination but we have to understand that the "friendly" Internet has
> long since past.  [..other good points elided..]

Maybe I am the only person in a position like the one I'm in, and/or maybe
I'm incredibly naive.  But the Internet escaped from the lab while we were
all collectively still making up our minds what it was or should be.  Now
there are billions of dollars invested in it and more billions being made
from it -- and that's a good thing in principle since the world clearly did
need something like the Internet and I'm glad they didn't end up with ISO
or Appletalk or IPX or XNS or DECnet or SNA.  (Not that any of those could
have gotten us even this far, but I'm off my topic with that.)

We all *need* the cooperation of people who at some level are competitors.
As we're discovering by means of http://www.vix.com/spam/, a lot of folks
are willing to endure complaints from their customers about less-than-full
connectivity rather than endure other, louder complaints about mailboxes and
newsgroups full of garbage.  And, when we all collectively decide to field
test the latest greatest Cisco download, we get _nowhere_ if we find and
execute workarounds in our own net while letting our "competitors" burn.
Some problems require "competing" NOCs to share "private" information without
benefit of an NDA in order to get a cross-AS problem solved.

It's always been clear to us that we'd have to steal eachother's customers
and market aggressively (even if it means slamming a competitor) and all the
"business as usual" tactics that mankind has honed over its thousands of
years of commercial experience.  And it's always been clear that at some
deeper and more technical level, we had all better pull together or we won't
have any peers (either because they can't stay up long enough, or because
they don't trust us -- the result is the same).

I didn't go to NANOG this time so I didn't hear what Peter said.  If it was
in the spirit of "we'll gradually take all your customers and put you out of
business", I would have said this was unlikely and a little impolite but not
out of character (sorry, Peter, but it's Zeus's honest truth).  If on the
other hand it was in the spirit of "our NOC isn't going to talk to your NOC
any more, and we won't help you track down folks who SYN-bomb you via us, and
we may just SYN-bomb you ourselves" then I must be missing one hell of a NANOG.