[136770] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Weekend Gedankenexperiment - The Kill Switch
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Matthew Moyle-Croft)
Fri Feb 4 19:22:55 2011
From: Matthew Moyle-Croft <mmc@internode.com.au>
To: Matthew Petach <mpetach@netflight.com>
Date: Sat, 5 Feb 2011 00:22:48 +0000
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTikWQo3qOE=E9u0C+v=qnVpxRpcA7aJAPJpoiuFB@mail.gmail.com>
Cc: NANOG list <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On 05/02/2011, at 8:57 AM, Matthew Petach wrote:
As has been noted previously, it's all about your frame of
reference. If the US is removed from the Internet, it does not
mean the Internet stops working; from the perspective of the
rest of the world, the Internet is still there.
I suspect you'll find it would be pretty crippled if the US was removed.
Given the majority of my country's (Australia) internet connectivity is to =
the USA (English language speakers looking for English language content) we=
'd probably find that we were left with very limited connectivity. Quite =
a number of Australian ISPs would have no international connectivity at all=
. We'd have limited capacity to Europe as the Westward paths are thin and=
expensive and it's mostly via the USA.
This is one of the risks the world, now relying on the "Interwebz" for comm=
unication runs. The heavy centralisation of the core of the internet (ie=
. really "Tier1" defines connectivity inside the USA only and is vague for =
the rest of the world) as well as Asia especially having very poor intra-As=
ia connectivity for various reasons. (ie. A number of Asian carriers opti=
mise for connectivity to the USA and have silly views about "regional tier =
1" that means they peer poorly within Asia. This leads to a lack of local =
connectivity. If the USA went "dark" then we'd lose connectivity to them)=
.
So, really, this is a call to the rest of the world to start thinking about=
the benefits of more regional connectivity and connectivity between Asia a=
nd Europe avoiding the USA so that any "kill switch" implemented doesn't ca=
use the world to have any more problems than it needs to face.
MMC
