Richard Bennett, NANOG posting, and Integrity

Dorian Kim dorian at blackrose.org
Mon Jul 28 17:04:57 UTC 2014


On Jul 28, 2014, at 12:36 PM, Bill Woodcock <woody at pch.net> wrote:

> 
> On Jul 28, 2014, at 9:28 AM, William Herrin <bill at herrin.us> wrote:
>> The data set suffers three flaws:
> 
> Depending on your point of view, a lot more than three, undoubtedly.
> 
>> 1. It is not representative of the actual traffic flows on the Internet.
> 
> There are an infinite number of things it’s not representative of, but it also doesn’t claim to be representative of them.  Traffic flows on the Internet is a different survey of a different thing, but if someone can figure out how to do it well, I would be very supportive of their effort.  It's a _much_ more difficult survey to do, since it requires getting people to pony up their unanonymized netflow data, which they’re a lot less likely to do, en masse, than their peering data.  We’ve been trying to figure out a way to do it on a large and representative enough scale to matter for twenty years, without too much headway.  The larger the Internet gets, the more difficult it is to survey well, so the problem gets harder with time, rather than easier.

This most likely won’t happen unless it becomes some sort of an international treaty obligation and even then it would end up in courts for a long time. Leaving aside data privacy requirements many carriers have, most companies guard their traffic information rather zealously for some reason.

-dorian


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