On a future of open settlement free peering

Daniel Golding dgolding at gmail.com
Wed Jul 30 18:08:44 UTC 2014


I hesitate to respond to Mr. Bennett. But since he has asserted my opinion
on this matter...

There is no reasonable reading of the early FCC Open Internet proposed
rulemaking that would lead to a ban on paid peering. It takes a number of
logical leaps and a great deal of inference to even get close to that: the
text of the proposed rule-making is crystal clear. I can turn any transit
link into a "paid peering" link in about 25 seconds (and only that long
because my IOS and JUNOS are rusty)

The law professor whose contribution you cite either misrepresented or
failed to understand the paper he (in turn) cited regarding MPEG-DASH and
congested networks. His inference was that maybe networks really aren't
congested and that the problem is the underlying video transmission
protocol. The idea is absurd - we've all seen the Backdoor Santa graphs.
Whether MPEG-DASH gracefully degrades under significant congestion is
another matter entirely, and is orthogonal to this discussion.

You seem to paint everyone who disagrees with you as being some sort of
cabal. Yet, my agreement with Patrick Gilmore on this issue is far more the
result of the extremism of the opposite position. The guiding principle of
the internet engineering community has always been to avoid breaking the
Internet because it has the effect of hurting everyone - a tragedy of the
commons. And yet, some broadband providers are playing a long game of
intentional congestion to attempt to reverse the existing content-broadband
power paradigm.

No one deserves settlement free interconnection and I don't believe it
should be universally mandated. However, the ability for carriers and
content providers to avoid onerous regulation has long depended on acting
responsibly, as is the case in any industry. Causing prolonged pain to your
own customers, as some monopolistic broadband providers are doing, is
inviting regulation. This is where I do part company with some folks in
this community - I think regulation is bad and will hurt us. People say
"well it can't get worse" - oh yes, it can. But, Mr. Bennett, your
paymasters are driving us to a more comprehensive regulatory regime,
whether we like it or not.

Mr. Bennett - the reason that everyone believes you are a lobbyist rather
than a sincere activist is that a sincere activist (who just happened to be
getting paid by the broadband providers) would realize that he is going
down a path of greater regulation. If you were sincere, you would find that
to be abhorrent. AEI once stood for competition and lower regulatory
burdens. Now, you take money to support monopoly providers who are
destroying established industry self-regulatory regimes.

Shameful.

Daniel Golding

(speaking for myself, not my employer)



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