Chinese bgp metering story

Fri Dec 18 19:22:59 UTC 2009

SIIA Chair Simon Tay on Clinton's Asia visit (Bloomberg, 20th Feb 2009):

Steve Engel (Bloomberg): Speaking of provoking, where do you see Hillary
bringing the tact in bringing the issues that Obama wants to raise to the
Chinese in her trip this time. Yuan revaluation is one, and also of course
human rights is top of the agenda. Is she going to be offending her host
here?

Simon Tay: Well, I think, China is the most important relationship that
America has got across the Pacific. It's vital to them, and it's vital to
everyone, and there are a couple of nasty missteps that could be made.

I think the currency issue after the Tim Geithner confirmation statement
would be one of the trickiest things to do. I think the downturn in China
has been understood in America. The Chinese have their own domestic
audience, their own domestic concerns, and if I were Clinton's advisor, I
would tell Clinton, please don't go there too hard and too fast.

I think that the human rights issue is similar. I think the America-China
realtionship needs to go beyond these hotspots, whether it's Tibet, or
currency, and really start off on something more positive. I mean, the
tradition is (that) every (US) President starts off  China wrong, and spends
the next six years or so trying to get it right. It would be nice to see
Clinton do something different and get it right from the start.

On 12/18/09 2:03 PM, "Nick Hilliard" <nick at foobar.org> wrote:

> On 18/12/2009 18:19, Joly MacFie wrote:
>> I have posted sa comment on this from ISOC England on
>> http://www.isoc-ny.org/p2/?p=134
>> 
>> Please feel free to add comments there.
> 
> I tried to read this article earlier today, but my lolwut meter exploded.
> 
> It's not really clear whether the confusion in this article is caused by
> poor understanding on the part of the journalist, the ITU, the European
> Commission, the UK parliament or China.  What is clear is that the article
> makes very little sense, other than to note that both China and the ITU
> like the idea of billing for bits at national borders.
> 
> China, being the sort of state that it is, is perfectly welcome to impose
> restrictions like metering for traffic and imposing billing regimes on
> international players.  The net result of this will probably be to trash
> China's network international connectivity, as the rest of the world mouths
> a collective "whatever, dude..." and then goes back to reading their less
> spamful inbox.
> 
> The ITU, for its part, seems to be involved in a desperate bid to make
> itself relevant to the internet world - an ironic position, considering
> they did their level best to squat on the internet in the early 90s and
> ignore it in the late 90s and early noughties.  Part of this desperation is
> manifesting itself as a movement by a number of countries to introduce
> international tariffing of internet bits and bytes at country borders.  For
> some reason, this peculiar notion appears to make sense to governments and
> national telcos - presumably because that's how it works in the PSTN world.
>  If all you have is a nail, everything looks like a hammer.
> 
> This isn't the only irrelevant absurdity being proposed by the ITU just
> now.  If you really want to have a good belly laugh at the level of
> misunderstanding by the ITU of how the internet actually works, just take a
> look at this document, which followed ITU Resolution 64:
> 
> http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-t/oth/3B/02/T3B020000020002PDFE.pdf
> 
> In the mean-time, I am refilling my lolwut meter with a quadruple supply of
> "wtf"s, in preparation for the ITU's next move.
> 
> There's a more serious aspect to this; the ITU is largely irrelevant to the
> Internet, and their actions indicate that they strongly resent this.  And
> there is nothing more dangerous than a well-funded bureaucracy which
> realises that it is now - to all intents and purposes - irrelevant.
> 
> Nick
> 