Regulatory intervention (Redux: Who is a Tier 1?)

William Allen Simpson wsimpson at greendragon.com
Thu Oct 6 15:56:27 UTC 2005


J. Oquendo wrote:

> Let me be the punching bag for pondering this on NANOG... What about the
> roles of governments building a consortium with Teir-1 NSP's where those
> backbone Tiers are regulated and have predefined, strictly enforced
> rulesets they'd have to follow. The irony of this is that it sounds both
> like a nightmare and a dream.
> 
Congratulations, you've reinvented the Internet.  This is exactly what
we did when we built the original (NSFnet).  It worked!

We specified regional interconnection.  If you wanted to connect, that's
where you had to connect, and you were required to take the traffic from
everybody else at the point of interconnection.  No arguments.

This partitioning is exactly what we predicted in many meetings when
discussion the terms of the contracts.

Markets are inefficient for infrastructure and tend toward monopoly.

Idiot laissez-faire pseudo-libertarians forget that all markets require
regulation and politics.

-- 
William Allen Simpson
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