Cogent/Level 3 Contracts (was: Cogent/Level 3 depeering)

Sat Oct 8 19:37:30 UTC 2005

On Fri, 7 Oct 2005, Michael.Dillon at btradianz.com wrote:

> Seems to me that the ideal here would be for the industry to agree on a
> dispute resolution mechanism and for all bilateral peering agreements to
> include the same arbitration clause. For this kind of arbitration to function
> well, the arbitrators need to have some understanding of the industry and the
> technology. This can only be accomplished by selecting one arbitration
> organization to handle all the arbitration duties for the whole industry.

the trouble is that there is no regulatory requirement of peering, there is no 
accepted standard for peering, the definition of fair varies greatly and the 
policies that exist are based on many criteria and personalities

the problem that would arise as i see it is that such an arbitrator would be 
consistent with its decisions but that would be consistently right for one 
player and consistently wrong for another.. and if we apply that to the current 
scenario we can see arguments for both cogent and level3s positions

> Airing dirty landry in public like this hurts the whole industry, not just
> Level 3 and Cogent in particular. The solution is to use binding arbitration
> clauses in all interconnect agreements whether settlement-free, paid peering
> or settlement-based.

i'm not sure the industry does get hurt, to us this is a major incident, but in 
reality there appears to only be a handful of affected customers and its not 
getting much attention from the press

someone implied this might work in the favour of non-tier-1 networks so if that 
were true that would be a benefit to such networks!

Steve