OpenTransit (france telecom) depeers cogent

Paul Vixie vixie at vix.com
Fri Apr 15 15:53:36 UTC 2005


dgolding at burtongroup.com (Daniel Golding) writes:

> This is part of the game.

more like a war.

> Party A depeers Party B. Party B has received 30 to 60 days notification.
> That gives party B enough time to do one of two things.
> 
> 1) They can ensure they have sufficient transit and/or peering with Party
> A's customers to ensure that all packets will be delivered. They can make
> sure that they are seeing all of A's routes through those other networks.
> This is what's called "being good to your customers"
> 
> 2) They can take the time to put measures in place to punish party A. Things
> like route filters to make sure that the only places A gets B's routes are
> through the (soon to be gone) direct peering. Things like canceling or
> turning down enough transit so they can claim they CAN'T send the traffic
> anywhere else. Things like filtering out A's routes from their upstream's
> BGP feeds. This is called "try to inflict enough pain to effect a reversal"

for the record, when the old AS174 (PSInet) depeered the old AS6461 (AboveNet),
we (old MFN) chose #1.  emotionally, i would have preferred #2 -- by a lot!
but i could tell that PSInet wasn't going to be alive long enough for this
to matter, so there was no long term payoff for the costs of such a war.  the
customers on both sides of the schism are probably happy that professionalism
prevailed... but if PSInet had won and also somehow stayed in existence, then
the whole industry would have suffered from the economic power thus conveyed.

in other words, sometimes it's better to take pain in a "lump sum" than on
the "time payment plan."  if that's what cogent's trying to do, they've got
my support.  if on the other hand cogent is, as accused here today, dumping
transit at below cost, then may they rot in hell.  (could i say that simpler?)

> Game theory is fun, folks! With real money on the line, its also very
> interesting.

yes indeed.
-- 
Paul Vixie



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