[10711] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Settlements
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dan Lynch)
Sun Mar 6 18:12:42 1994
Date: 6 Mar 1994 12:11:09 -0800
From: "Dan Lynch" <dlynch@interop.com>
To: "com-priv" <com-priv@psi.com>, "Miles R Fidelman" <fidelman@civicnet.org>
Reply to: Settlements
Let me play angel's advocate here... (Already seems to be an over supply of
devil's advocates on the planet, eh?)
Miles wrote earlier regarding NAPs:
>iv. what should the rules be
>something pretty much like the CIX rules: anyone can interconnect, and
>everyone has to accept traffic from everyone else without settlements
Now what is so darn wrong with the idea of "settlements"? To a simple minded
person (such as myself) Settlements just mean that if you and I are doing
similar work for the world of "customers" out there and "I" end up doing some
of that work for "your" customer, then you ought to pay me something for doing
part of the job. I can see a theoretical argument of "If the nature of the
business is that we both (all) end up doing an equal amount of work for each
other, then, heck, why bother with all the record keeping". Is that the
underlying reason for the agurment for their being no settlements?
My simple minded view of how the Internet has evolved thus far is that all the
"carriers" (of IP traffic) are acting like the former AT&T in the "US only"
marketplace. They "owned" the customer end to end. So who cared about
internal settlements? The local phone providers just took all the traffic and
sent it out to its destination and as long as it stayed inside the AT&T system
there as no reason to do settlements from a P&L standpoint for the company.
(I'm sure the individual state tax authorities forced them to break it out
along those lines for individual P&Ls along those lines...) Well, the current
IP providers are acting like there is no "outside world" to them. Gee, it just
ain't so.
What about the following idea: What is missing here is a true "IXC" for IP
traffic. A "carrier" whose only purpose was to take all "local" traffic and
forward it to the appropriate "local" destination? Forgetting who might own
such an entity and forgetting the perhaps idiotic "Star" topology that that
business model might look like, isn't that the place where settlements would
need to happen?
Why has not such an entity come into existence? Or, has it and I have not
noticed?
Dan
