jared:
this is the ability of a single host operator to make their own local policy decisions. randy: which leads to the heat death of the net joe: or allows the net to prosper, since policy is distributed rather than centralised. randy: consider verifying, or making any assertions about, or having any confidence in, the correctness of a universe of distributed and opaque policy.
to further amplify and make clear whose ideas i am stealing, let me quote tim griffin: The Interdomain routing system will enter a state of non- convergence that is so disruptive as to effectively bring down large portions of the Internet. The problem will be due to unforeseen global interactions of locally defined routing policies. Furthermore, no one ISP will have enough knowledge to identify and debug the problem. It will take nearly a week to fix and cost the world economy billions of dollars. The world press will learn that the internet engineering community had known about this lurking problem all along.... [ tim goes on to suggest how we might keep from getting in such a mess ] i suggest that we take this seriously. randy