[173013] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: Net Neutrality...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Naslund, Steve)
Mon Jul 14 18:24:25 2014
X-Original-To: nanog@nanog.org
From: "Naslund, Steve" <SNaslund@medline.com>
To: "nanog@nanog.org" <nanog@nanog.org>
Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2014 22:24:17 +0000
In-Reply-To: <43FD3CC0-A628-41D8-9C59-896F7A63703A@istaff.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org
Net Neutrality is really something that has me worried. I know there have =
to be some ground rules, but I believe that government regulation of intern=
et interconnection and peering is a sure way to stagnate things. I have be=
en in the business a long time and remember how peering kind of evolved bas=
ed on mutual benefit or some concept of "doing the right thing". For examp=
le, at InterAccess Chicago, our peer policy in the late 90s was pretty much=
the following.
1. Non-profits or educational institutions could private peer with us as l=
ong as they bore the cost of the circuit. (this kind of connection was mor=
e beneficial to them than us).
2. Comparable sized carriers got to peer with us, with each of us picking =
up our portions of equipment and circuit cost since it was mutually benefic=
ial.
3. We would peer with anyone at any NAP we had a mutual appearance in.
4. Larger network usual would not peer with smaller networks without some =
sort of compensation.
Seemed to work pretty fair at the time and we managed the backbone by watch=
ing customer traffic. If things got congested, you paid for or peered with=
whoever you needed to in order to get acceptable performance for our custo=
mers. The big guys did get to call the shots and made you pay but then aga=
in they provided the largest fastest connections so I guess it was fair eno=
ugh. It may have been the wild west in some ways but at that time everyone=
needed to get along because if your peering policies were unfair you would=
get universally shunned and then you would have real problems. I hate tha=
t the network operators now feel the need to ask the government to step in.=
When you ask for that don't be surprised that the government creates a cu=
mbersome mess and disadvantages you in another way. The problem is that th=
e gov does not react at internet speed.
I remember the first unbundling agreements and trust me when I say that our=
selves and the ILEC both found the gov't rules to be nearly unworkable. We=
eventually started with the telecom act framework that forced them to the =
table where they finally sat down with us and said "Ok, Ok, what do you rea=
lly need here" and we banged out a pretty good interconnection agreement th=
at was workable for both of us. Well, about as workable as it gets with an=
ILEC.
I think what will really drive everything is the market forces. You either=
provide what your end user wants or you go out of business. The customer =
could care less who pays for what pieces or what is fair because in the end=
, their service provider is the only one they will punish. If Netflix beco=
mes universally hard to connect to, then they will lose the customers. The=
customer does not really care why your connectivity sucks, they just know =
that it does and that if someone better comes along, they are gone.
Maybe something better would be some sort of industry group that you could =
become a member of and that group could resolve peering disputes through so=
me kind of arbitration process. The benefit of being a member could be so=
mething like the opportunity to peer with any other member on demand with s=
ome sort of cost splitting arrangement. They would need something like a g=
roup wide interconnection agreement. The responsibility would then be the =
industry and not some appointed FCC working group that spends all of their =
time writing convoluted gibberish. If the group was big enough and powerfu=
l enough, the incentive to get on board would be huge.
Steven Naslund
Chicago IL
