Lamar Owen wrote:
On Saturday 01 November 2008 20:00:46 Matthew Petach wrote:
Unfortunately, as I'm sure you're all too aware, for public companies, it's
very hard to get away with saying "I was doing what was right for the
Internet, not what would make my business the most money" at a
shareholder meeting, or during an earning's call with Wall Street
analysts; they tend to be very unforgiving of actions that aren't in
line with the short-term profit-making goal, to the point where CEOs
have been ousted and class-action lawsuits threatened when it
seems the actions being taken weren't geared to optimize profits
for the shareholders.
The next Great Compromise could be over multihoming of endusers (whether the
enduser is a content consumer or a content provider is irrelevant; IP at
Layer 3 is peer-to-peer anyway, between end systems). After all, if
providers are not willing to 'budge' a little 'for the good of the Internet'
then why should endusers reduce or give up multihoming aspirations 'for the
good of the Internet?'
After all, if access to the 'Internet' is a metric for making money, and money
is being lost by access to content consumers being cut due to depeering
events outside the enduser's control, then it makes business sense for an
enduser to multihome, to bring connectivity events closer to the enduser's
control. Want to prevent multihoming exploding routing tables? Prevent the
desire to multihome by limiting 'partitioning' events.
So now I'm going to join Randy and say this is rehashing. We know the
"interwebz" are a collection of AS. We know they can partition at any time.
We know that certain players have a history of causing this to happen
more then others.
What I haven't seen discussed in any great detail, is how to limit those
events.
Some are asking for regulation. Ok. What will that regulation look like?
As the technical network operations community, what
do we want to see? What stipulations etc? Are a few interruptions that
affect a small subset of IP addresses and AS on the net
really worth going through the effort to pass regulation around the
world? If so, then let's take advantage of a long and rich history
of reaching consensus (see the RFC process which I think has work pretty
well) and hash out what we want to see.
Otherwise let's move on.
Charles
