On Tuesday 04 November 2008 11:55:01 Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
On Nov 4, 2008, at 11:51 AM, Tomas L. Byrnes wrote:
The concept of "Transit Free" is a political failure, not a technical one.
We disagree. [snip] So I guess you could say the current situation is a political success.
I would say a 'qualified' political success. Like most other political solutions to technical problems, the concept of transit-free (and even the differentiation between transit and settlement-free peering) is a best-effort compromise, and works pretty well under most circumstances. But, which is worse: a completely 100% reachable Internet* with massive transit congestion that is massively expensive or the current partitionable Internet* that actually works and is affordable? Note: * There is no such thing as a 100% reachable 'Internet,' just a tangled lattice of interconnections of autonomous systems who provide best-effort interconnections. To what extent there IS an 'Internet' changes every second.