[8618] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
An Open Letter
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dick St.Peters)
Fri Nov 26 21:35:51 1993
Date: Fri, 26 Nov 93 21:13:21 EST
From: stpeters@spare-parts.crd.ge.com (Dick St.Peters)
To: walkerl@iscmed.med.ge.com
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
Reply-To: <stpeters@dawn.crd.ge.com>
To: Larry Walker, GE Medical Systems
Larry, Awhile ago you asked me for my analysis of the politics you
stumbled into on com-priv. The only thing that seems reasonable is to
make my response an open letter up for criticism from all sides. If I
am successfully evenhanded, I should antagonize just about everyone,
and I expect I will :-)
The most basic issue is what the structure of the U.S. portion of the
Internet should be. There are two models fighting for dominance, and I
consider them both badly broken, for reasons that come out by just
explaining the values that I think important, beginning with:
1. There should be competition at every level.
2. What a customer does with a connection should be a matter
between customer and provider only.
Neither of these can ever be perfectly achieved, but that is common to
all aspects of life; these are ideals toward which to strive, not
goals we expect to attain. Such is life.
Each of these is also its own paradox. If there is to be universal
exchange, everything must come together at the top. Where there is
only one (backbone or exchange - it matters not), there is no
competition. If I sell you a pipe, restrictions I put on how you use
it can imply restrictions on your customers. The correction for that
is the first principle - if you don't like my restrictions, you look
for another provider who doesn't require them. At the top, this is not
an option, so a third value is:
3. There should be no restrictions at the top.
The Internet has always violated this. For years the NSFNET was the
only common interconnect, and it has an Acceptable Use Policy that
prohibits most commercial use. The growing commercial Internet
considered this an unacceptable situation, which it clearly was, and
they countered by forming the Commercial Internet eXchange or CIX. The
CIX solved the commercial-use problem, but it imposed its own
restriction: only traffic travelling originating and terminating on CIX
members will be exchanged by the CIX. Traffic is judged not by how it
got to the CIX, but by where it originated - ans similarly, by where
its final destination is. In effect, the CIX set itself up as a judge
of who is and who is not a network, a very grey area with many
implications.
Formation of the CIX addressed a real problem. Unfortunately, the
providers who formed it chose a solution that fixes only their problems
while creating new ones of even larger scale for the rest of us. I'm
not suggesting this was the intent. I think they were well-intentioned
but just didn't think things through enough.
However, forming the CIX also gave them them the power to break the
Internet, as they have amply demonstrated. This shows the need for a
fourth value I had not previously appreciated:
4. The Internet must be free of capricious disruption for any
reason.
Those are the things that I think matter. There are a lot of others
that are more like noise in the system. For example, there is constant
bickering about government involvement, particularly NSF involvement.
This is time-honored American politics ... undoubtedly not even just
ours. We will wait forever for an Internet if we demand this be solved
first. There are questions about whether ANS used its position close
to the NSF and its status as provider of the backbone to pry customers
loose from the regionals, its own customers. Again, whether it did or
not isn't a big issue except to those directly involved. What matters
is that as sole backbone provider it could have.
Before this routing war, I was enough of a CIX advocate to have asked
Bill Washburn, CIX executive director, for help in convincing GEIS to
join. I hadn't really realized the implications of the CIX's members
only policy, but I think that it could be fixed, from a customer's
perspective, by simply changing it to say that if a packet arrives on
a CIX member and leaves on one, it's an acceptable exchange. I have
to confess I haven't the foggiest notion what to do about #4.
--
Dick St.Peters
GE Corporate R&D, Schenectady, NY stpeters@dawn.crd.ge.com
