Re: Sending vs requesting. Was: Re: Sprint / Cogent

* Matthew Petach · * Sat Nov 01 20:01:26 2008

On 11/1/08, Barrett Lyon <[email protected]> wrote:
...
>  In this case, it's very clear that customers are impacted and the Internet
> as a whole suffers, which is really unfortunate.  The end result of a
> business decision has been to sacrifice the customer's needs, trust, and
> ability to communicate.  It's a bad maxim to subscribe to!  I really hope
> that other networks do apply more thinking into peering than just what's
> best for business -- it sure shows off an ugly underbelly.
>
>  -Barrett

Unfortunately, as I'm sure you're all too aware, for public companies, it's
very hard to get away with saying "I was doing what was right for the
Internet, not what would make my business the most money" at a
shareholder meeting, or during an earning's call with Wall Street
analysts; they tend to be very unforgiving of actions that aren't in
line with the short-term profit-making goal, to the point where CEOs
have been ousted and class-action lawsuits threatened when it
seems the actions being taken weren't geared to optimize profits
for the shareholders.

Converging two threads together, I think the same pressure affects
IPv6 deployment and will affect IPv6 peering; while it would be *best*
for the Internet if everyone put the time and resources forward to get
dual-stacked now, bring up widespread peering, and get IPv6 to a
point where it's a viable transport mechanism, the real fact of the
matter is that there's no profit motive in moving to IPv6 at the
moment, so people just aren't going to do it, no matter how much
it may be "best for the Internet".

Fix the market drivers for public companies, and then we can
fix the Internet; otherwise, we'll always be steering towards
that which makes sense for the business, regardless of which
customers of other networks it hurts, or which resource exhaustion
cliff it hurtles us towards.

Putting on a devil's advocate hat for a moment...if various international
regulatory bodies and government agencies mandated universal
connectivity via both IPv4 and IPv6, depeering would cease to be
an issue; regardless of what the business side said, companies
would not be allowed to partition the Internet, and widespread adoption
of IPv6 would be forced, rather than being a "maybe someday" case.
Downside is that prices would go up, and expansion into new regions
would slow down, as the costs associated with developing new areas
would bring a much higher price tag.  It would be better for the Internet
as a whole, but worse for most of the individual users of it, from a cost
perspective.  Would you still say things were better for the overall
Internet at that point, if it meant everyone had to pay more in order
to ensure that universal connectivity?

I'm cheap, so I'm leaning towards the side of letting the market
work these issues out; but I'm always willing to listen to other
thoughts on the matter.  :)

Matt