On Jan 30, 2014, at 10:20 PM, Mark Andrews <marka@isc.org> wrote:
I figure there will be similar problem for other business in other countries and they will fight a similar battles. Eventually the regulators will step in because it is bad for small businesses to be shut out of the Internet.
Mark - ISPS consciously breaking Internet services are bound to attract regulatory attention, but that does not necessarily mean that in the end there will be regulatory action. In the case of peering and route acceptance, it is fairly easy to show that there is a finite amount of routes that a given ISP can accept, and each of these routes has different value (i.e. some have large traffic flows, some are peer traffic engineering, some of required backup routes for shared multihomed corporate customers, etc.) The result is not simple to regulate, because you can't just mandate "accept all routes offered" - some ISPs are already trimming what they accept to accommodate their particular flavor of routing hardware. For last few decades, we've basically been relying on the IP allocation/assignment policies and their minimum block sizes as a proxy for the default "worth accepting" metric, but this may not prevail once there is serious pressure to fragment blocks to obtain better utilization. It would be nice if there was a way to fairly "settle up" for the imputed cost of adding a given route to the routing table, as this would provide some proportionate backpressure on growth, would create incentives for deaggregate cleanup, etc. We don't have such a system, so it falls to each ISP to decide what route is worth accepting based on type and the offering peer's business relationship... FYI, /John Disclaimer: My views alone. Note - I haven't had enable on any backbone routers in this _century_, so feel free to discount/discard if so desired. ;-)