Email peering (Was: Economics of SPAM [Was: Micorsoft's Sender IDAuthentication......?]

Thu Jun 16 16:18:52 UTC 2005

On Thu, 16 Jun 2005 Michael.Dillon at btradianz.com wrote:

>
>>> If the BGP peering side of the business can sort out all of
>>> this stuff, then why can't the email side of the business do
>>> the same, or perhaps, do even better?
>>
>> It's not comparable, as has been explained several times to you.
>
> Perhaps you have never been involved in BGP peering? Let
> me explain what the BGP peering side of the business does,
> in addition to operating BGP sessions with peers. To start
> with, most ISPs don't start peering until after they have
> negotiated and agreement. Those agreements are legal contracts
> with many pages specifying the responsibilities of the two
> parties, limits on how the technology is to be applied,
> SLAs, processes for interoperation and communication between
> NOCs, i.e. the people protocols.

This is a commonly made claim, but is rarely true in practice.  A few of 
the largest networks, generally with small numbers of peers, require 
peering contracts.  Most of the smaller networks with large numbers of 
peering sessions seem to have decided that the overhead of dealing with 
contracts isn't justified by the benefits.  We've got several hundred 
peering sessions here, and maybe four or five signed contracts.

> The thousands of bilateral BGP peering contracts are most
> definitely comparable to the email peering that I am
> proposing. I have seen many of these contracts in companies
> that I worked for in the past. They are rather similar to
> one another in many ways. Since the total number of BGP
> peers is rather small, it is quite workable to let these
> contracts evolve to some sort of rough standard and that is
> what has happened.

If we ignore the contract piece, this sounds a lot like UUCP.

> In the email world, there are many, many more players, and
> some kind of secret sauce is essential to converge bilateral
> email peering agreements to some kind of community standard
> rather than letting evolution take its course and risking
> chaos as a result. The stuff that you call RIR sauce, is what
> I would call "open and public negotiation" in some kind of
> a forum which is not biased or dominated by parties who may
> have some market dominance. It is, in fact, the antithesis of
> a model with a few big actors.

It sounds like you envision five big actors, who would function as 
regulated long distance/international e-mail carriers, each of which would 
have a monopoly in their region.  This is the phone network model in a lot 
of places, except that phone monopolies don't often cover more than a few 
countries while your five e-mail monopolies would have an average of 40 
countries each.

I'll withhold public judgment on whether this would be a good thing.

-Steve