Sending vs requesting. Was: Re: Sprint / Cogent

Tue Nov 4 20:13:31 UTC 2008

Lamar Owen wrote:
> On Saturday 01 November 2008 20:00:46 Matthew Petach wrote:
>   
>> Unfortunately, as I'm sure you're all too aware, for public companies, it's
>> very hard to get away with saying "I was doing what was right for the
>> Internet, not what would make my business the most money" at a
>> shareholder meeting, or during an earning's call with Wall Street
>> analysts; they tend to be very unforgiving of actions that aren't in
>> line with the short-term profit-making goal, to the point where CEOs
>> have been ousted and class-action lawsuits threatened when it
>> seems the actions being taken weren't geared to optimize profits
>> for the shareholders.
>>     
>
> The next Great Compromise could be over multihoming of endusers (whether the 
> enduser is a content consumer or a content provider is irrelevant; IP at 
> Layer 3 is peer-to-peer anyway, between end systems).  After all, if 
> providers are not willing to 'budge' a little 'for the good of the Internet' 
> then why should endusers reduce or give up multihoming aspirations 'for the 
> good of the Internet?'
>
> After all, if access to the 'Internet' is a metric for making money, and money 
> is being lost by access to content consumers being cut due to depeering 
> events outside the enduser's control, then it makes business sense for an 
> enduser to multihome, to bring connectivity events closer to the enduser's 
> control.  Want to prevent multihoming exploding routing tables?  Prevent the 
> desire to multihome by limiting 'partitioning' events.
>   

So now I'm going to join Randy and say this is rehashing. We know the 
"interwebz" are a collection of AS. We know they can partition at any time.
We know that certain players have a history of causing this to happen 
more then others.

What I haven't seen discussed in any great detail, is how to limit those 
events.

Some are asking for regulation. Ok. What will that regulation look like? 
As the technical network operations community, what
do we want to see?  What stipulations etc?  Are a few interruptions that 
affect a small subset of IP addresses and AS on the net
really worth going through the effort to pass regulation around the 
world? If so, then let's take advantage of  a long and rich history
of reaching consensus (see the RFC process which I think has work pretty 
well) and hash out what we want to see.

Otherwise let's move on.

Charles