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

Thu Oct 6 17:41:09 UTC 2005

On Oct 6, 2005, at 11:56 AM, William Allen Simpson 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!

I would argue the NSFnet would not scale to today's Internet.  Not to  
mention today's Internet has the added value of not sucking up 90% of  
NSF's budget.

> 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.

I'm wondering why "this partitioning" - predicted or not - is a "bad  
thing"?

> Markets are inefficient for infrastructure and tend toward monopoly.

Strangely, the Internet has not tended toward monopoly.  If you think  
otherwise, you have been reading too many press releases.

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

Politics are a natural part of human interaction.  Regulation  
sometimes follows.

The Internet is fairly unregulated.  It works fairly well - better  
than many regulated industries.

I guess I'm missing your point?

-- 
TTFN,
patrick