> On Nov 5, 2024, at 00:56, William Herrin <b...@herrin.us> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 4, 2024 at 8:44 AM Douglas Fischer <fischerdoug...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> But I have seen a reasonably large scenario in which the IXP operator,
>> maintaining the MLPA LAN with the pair of Route-Servers, adds
>> another participant with the SAME ASN as the route-servers,
>> and through this participant starts to sell traffic.
>
> Of course they can sell transit. The reason they don't is that it has
> the potential to create a conflict of interest. When your customer is
> also a competitor and your customer suffers an outage that's your
> fault... Well, you see where this is going.
Yep. Other-Bill has this exactly right. To add a little to that, for an IXP
to be successful, many ISPs have to trust it enough to build out to it and
participate in it, which requires investment on their parts. To be
trustworthy, it helps a _lot_ if the IXP is “neutral.” That is, it’s not a
part of your competitor, and you have reason to believe that if you invest in
it now, it won’t treat you unfairly in the future.
So, to succeed, it helps a _lot_ if IXP have very simple, unitary models. They
don’t do other things which makes them complicated, opaque, hard-to-understand,
hard-to-trust. Just not handling money at all is a huge win for IXP stability
and growth, for instance, because it simplifies things and makes them more
easily trusted.
Selling transit is a thing that ISPs do. When an IXP competes with its ISP
participants, it not only sets itself up for the conflicts and failures that
Bill points out, it also makes itself less trustworthy, because of the _future
risk_ of those conflicts and failures, and that decreased trustworthiness
decreases “investor confidence” and ISP willingness to extend themselves, and
that, in turn, causes the IXP to not grow, or grow more slowly than it would
otherwise.
-Bill
