On Wed, Oct 13, 2021 at 6:26 AM Masataka Ohta < mohta@necom830.hpcl.titech.ac.jp> wrote:
Matthew Petach wrote:
With an anycast setup using the same IP addresses in every location, returning SERVFAIL doesn't have the same effect, however, because failing over from anycast address 1 to anycast address 2 is likely to be routed to the same pop location, where the same result will occur.
That's why that is a bad idea. Alternative name servers with different IP addresses should be provided at separate locations.
Sure. But that doesn't do anything to help prevent the type of outage that hit Facebook, which was the point I was trying to make in my response. Facebook did use > different IP addresses, and it didn't matter, because the underlying health of the network is what was at issue, not the health of the nameservers.
A possible solution is to force unbundling of CDN providers and transit providers by antitrust agencies.
Other people have already spoken to the misunderstanding or misuse of the terms "CDN provider" and "transit provider" in this case. I'd like to take a moment to point out the other problem with this sentence, which is "antitrust agencies". One of the key aspects to both CDN providers and transit providers is they tend to be multi-national organizations with infrastructure in multiple countries on multiple continents. A CDN provider that only exists in one city is a hosting company, not a CDN. A transit provider that only provides network connectivity in one city, or one state, isn't a very valuable transit provider, since the implicit (and sometimes explicit) promise the transit network is making to their customers is that they will carry their IP traffic to the rest of the world, ensuring as best as they can that their prefixes are visible to others, and that their packets are carried to other networks, wherever they may be. You won't be terribly successful as a transit provider if your business model is to "carry traffic for your customers all the way to the edges of the city", or "carry your traffic anywhere within the country it needs to go, but discard it if it needs to go outside the country." So, given that both our CDN provider and our transit network provider operate in more than one country, what "antitrust agency" would have jurisdiction over the CDN provider and the transit provider that could force unbundling of their services? What if every country the CDN provider and the transit provider operate in has a different definition of what it means to "unbundle" the services? Then, CDN providers can't pursue efficiency only to kill
fundamental redundancy of DNS.
For network neutrality, backbone providers *MUST* be neutral for contents they carry.
Nothing at all requires backbone providers to be neutral. Backbone networks are free to restrict what traffic or content passes across their networks. Indeed, many backbone providers include in their terms of service lists of traffic that they reserve the right to block or discard. Most of the time, those clauses are focused on traffic which may be injurious to the backbone network or the systems that support it; but even DDoS traffic which isn't itself injurious to the backbone, but does impact other customers, may be dropped at the backbone providers' discretion. We should recognize the fundamental difference between
independent, thus neutral, backbone providers and CDN providers with anti-neutral backbone of their own.
Others have, I think, already addressed more directly their fundamental disagreement with that statement. ^_^;
Masataka Ohta
Thanks! :) Matt