NANOG67 - Tipping point of community and sponsor bashing?

Wed Jun 15 16:19:43 UTC 2016

I hope you'll excuse the aggressive snipping, as I wanted to try to address
as many of your points without repeating myself as possible.

On Wed, Jun 15, 2016 at 8:48 AM, Nick Hilliard <nick at foobar.org> wrote:

> Hi Dave,
>
> Dave Temkin wrote:
>
> With respect to all parties involved in this discussion, I'd suggest
> that these four IXPs are not representative of the IXP community in the
> areas that you talked about, namely size, marketing budgets, corporate
> profit / surplus or expansion intentions.
>

They are representative of the most important IXPs to deliver traffic from
in Western Europe.

I would posit that what defines important to me may not be what defines
important to you and the same can be said when you look at how various
"internet" companies look at what's important in their vertical.

>
> >
> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18ztPX_ysWYqEhJlf2SKQQsTNRbkwoxPSfaC6ScEZAG8/edit?pref=2&pli=1#gid=0
>
> I have heard people from other large US
> multinationals say that LINX's outreach and policy representation alone
> were worth the port charges they pay.

I dedicated an entire slide to this. I think Malcom does great work.

> Netnod runs a dns root server
> system (i.root-servers.net) as well as a heavy duty time service.

There are others who do this for no cost and some who do it for government
money. Whether or not my port fees should subsidize this is a valid
question, and was brought up in the Q&A afterwards.

>
> Regarding the pricing reduction on page 16 of your preso, the US$ and
> UK£ are not much different than what they were 5 years ago, but the €
> has dropped by 30% against the US$.
>

You speak to this below, however if my business is primarily run in USD
(which was the relevant use case presented: I'm a US company deciding if I
should peer in Europe or buy transit) then those currency fluctuations have
a very different impact than if I'm a European company functioning
primarily in local currency.

>
> You made the point that some US companies buy services in Europe using
> US$, but not all do.
>

Not all do. Again, this wasn't an exhaustive list of what every IXP and
every member does. This is what I see, and the entire presentation was
framed as that. How currency fluctuations impact my business will likely
vary significantly from how they impact yours.

> Regardless of all that, Job's pricing spreadsheet suggests that the
> pricing models are substantially lower for the other IXPs in his list,
> and have seen proportional reductions at least equal to transit pricing
> drops, if not greater.  If your talk was about IXPs in general, this was
> an important omission.
>

There are absolutely some great pricing models on IXPs. There are also some
terrible ones. I highlighted the ones I find to be bad. Again, my
presentation, my opinion, in the same way that someone might stand up and
say "Cisco sucks because they don't have the CLI I want" or "Juniper sucks
because they charge too much for ports with TCAM". I don't have to then
present an exhaustive list of those that are better in order to validate my
claim.

I did purposefully mention SIX as a polar opposite example - there is
definitely a happy medium to be found.

> Two of the organisations you mentioned are member-owned and are bound by
> formal votes from their membership.  Member votes are, in fact, legally
> binding in most if not all member-owned IXPs that I'm aware of in
> Europe.  Netnod, DECIX and many others are not participant-owned, so
> this does not apply.
>

Which I mentioned in my presentation. I refrained from exhaustively
explaining each model as IANAL and didn't feel it made sense for me to
attempt to explain four different nations laws. I did invite comment from
the floor for the organizations mentioned to do so, and they declined.

To be clear: I did apologize both in the Plenary and then later on Twitter
if the "Membership" slide was misleading, as I did not intend on implying
that LINX is not a member owned organization.

>
> In the area of marketing budgets and expansion, there is probably a
> correlation between the two, but I think it's worth mentioning that
> pretty much no other IXP - at least out of those mentioned in Job's
> spreadsheet - have anything close to that % of their overall budgets
> dedicated to marketing
>

It wasn't. It was about the IXPs that mattered to me. If we had an entire
day to talk about this I could've been way more exhaustive (and everyone
would've been way more exhausted...). LONAP and INEX are great counter
examples.

> If people don't like the idea of LINX, DE-CIX and AMS-IX expanding
> outside their current markets, they don't have to connect to them and
> that's ok because this is a fully unregulated market: no-one has ever
> forced anyone to connect to any IXP.
>

Completely agree!

>
> Otherwise, thanks for giving a great talk - it's both refreshing and
> stimulating to have this discussion, and it's great to get feedback from
> the community about it.
>
>
Thank you! That was the point of the talk: to start the discussion. It
definitely has, and I'm glad for that.

>
>