DNS pulling BGP routes?

Mon Oct 18 18:46:55 UTC 2021

On Mon, Oct 18, 2021 at 11:16 AM William Herrin <bill at herrin.us> wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 18, 2021 at 10:30 AM Baldur Norddahl
> <baldur.norddahl at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Around here there are certain expectations if you sell a product called
> IP Transit and other expectations if you call the product paid peering. The
> latter is not providing the whole internet and is cheaper.
>
> The problem with paid peering is that it creates a conflict of
> interest which corruptly influences the company's behavior. Two
> customers are paying you in full for a service but if one elects not
> to pay you will also deny or degrade the service to the other one who
> has, in fact, paid you.
>

The phrase "paying you in full" is the stumbling point with your
claim.

As Baldur noted, "paid peer [...] is not providing the whole
internet and is cheaper."

If the two customers are "paying you in full", then they're
paying you for transit, and as such, they get a copy of the
full tables, regardless of how you learn those routes,
whether through a paid relationship or a settlement free
relationship.

If the two customers are *not* paying full price, but are
instead paying the reduced price for "paid peering",
then they each recognize that the set of prefixes they
are receiving, and the spread of their prefixes in return
are inherently limited, *and will change over time as
the customer relationships on each side change."

Nobody buying "paid peering" expects the list of prefixes
sent and received across those sessions to remain constant
forever.  That would imply no new customers are ever added,
and would imply no customers ever leave, which is clearly
unreasonable in the real world.

If you, as the customer paying for paid peering, see the
list of prefixes decreasing over time, when the contract
comes up for renewal, you are likely to argue for a lower
price, or may decide it's no longer worth it, and decide to
not renew the relationship.

On the other hand, if you, as the provider, are increasing
the number of prefixes being seen across those paid peerings
at a substantial rate, when the next renewal cycle comes up,
you may decide the price for paid peering should go up, because
you're providing more value across those sessions.

Each side evaluates the then-present set of prefixes being
exchanged when the contract comes up for renewal, to
decide if it's still worth it or not.

But if you're "paying in full" for IP transit, then the sessions
should include as much of the full BGP table as possible,
potentially including a default route, and the promise of that
session is to make your prefixes as visible to the entire rest
of the Internet as possible.

(This is, as a small aside, why I don't think Cogent should be
allowed to label their product "IP transit" so long as they are
willfully refusing to propagate their customer's prefixes to
*all* of the rest of the Internet.  So long as they are choosing
to cherry-pick out certain networks that they will *not* propagate
their customers routes to, they are *not* providing true IP transit,
and should not label it as such.)

>
> Regards,
> Bill Herrin
>

Thanks!

Matt
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/attachments/20211018/a705b764/attachment.html>