On Dec 18, 2009, at 1:47 PM, Fred Baker wrote: > > On Dec 18, 2009, at 10:32 AM, Steven Bellovin wrote: > >> Could you post a summary, in appropriate technical terms, of precisely what >> is being requested, and what changes to BGP they want? > > Really. > > I can read tea leaves with the best of them, and the tea leaves I see tell me > the reporter (in the story the blog points to) doesn't have a clue. What is > the substance of the proposal? > > Depending on objectives, I would expect that this means that China wants to > look at routers (which run BGP), and > > (a) use IPFIX-or-something to measure traffic rates and charge for > trans-China transit, > (b) use interface statistics to measure traffic rates and charge for > trans-China transit, > (c) tax Chinese ISPs for transit services they provide, or maybe > (d) use IPFIX-or-something to map communication patterns. > > It would be (d) that the reporter might seriously want to worry about. > > But what is all this about "is the ITU interested in changing BGP"? If the > word "metering" makes any sense in context, BGP doesn't meter anything. > > Or using BGP to carry charging information, so that ISPs could use that in their policies? Or charging end-to-end, rather than for transit?
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb