On Fri, 7 Oct 2005, Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com wrote:
Seems to me that the ideal here would be for the industry to agree on a dispute resolution mechanism and for all bilateral peering agreements to include the same arbitration clause. For this kind of arbitration to function well, the arbitrators need to have some understanding of the industry and the technology. This can only be accomplished by selecting one arbitration organization to handle all the arbitration duties for the whole industry.
the trouble is that there is no regulatory requirement of peering, there is no accepted standard for peering, the definition of fair varies greatly and the policies that exist are based on many criteria and personalities the problem that would arise as i see it is that such an arbitrator would be consistent with its decisions but that would be consistently right for one player and consistently wrong for another.. and if we apply that to the current scenario we can see arguments for both cogent and level3s positions
Airing dirty landry in public like this hurts the whole industry, not just Level 3 and Cogent in particular. The solution is to use binding arbitration clauses in all interconnect agreements whether settlement-free, paid peering or settlement-based.
i'm not sure the industry does get hurt, to us this is a major incident, but in reality there appears to only be a handful of affected customers and its not getting much attention from the press someone implied this might work in the favour of non-tier-1 networks so if that were true that would be a benefit to such networks! Steve