"Jay R. Ashworth" <jra@scfn.thpl.lib.fl.us> writes:

At the risk of litigation, Kent makes a good point here: how much of the problems we see are engineering based, and how much are (let's say it softly: political?

A great deal of the Internet's evolution has been affected in the past by a number of strong personalities, each of whom had her or his own set of political beliefs. There is probably no aspect of the Internet which is untouched by this observation. To some extent ALL of the problems at MAE-EAST and MAE-WEST are political, which is unsurprising, as they were both born out of politics. The first was created as a somewhat practical, somewhat political action against unfair ENSS access terms, the second was created as a political action against bad NAP design, PAC*Bell, the ATM heads at Bellcore, and probably the NSF as an agency. The names themselves come from Andrew Partan, one of those people with strong personalities and technical acumen. MAE-EAST and MAE-WEST are exploding because they are victims of success. They completely blew the official alternatives out of the water, to the extent that ANS and the ATM NAP operators are generally seen these days as Also-Rans. Unfortunately, they are in danger of blowing themselves out of the water too, thanks to the difficulties of scaling to meet demand. The history of MAE-EAST's technical evolution is amusing. There have been enormous problems in the past which have lead to threats of complete withdrawal by the initial parties, and occasional partial withdrawals. The current trend towards using private point-to-point links is really not much more different than, for example, the SWAB (in reaction to the MAE distributed ethernet not working under load, and MFS taking a long time to figure out how to address the problem properly), except that it was better thought-out than that was, and considerably more popular. To be brutal (who, me?), I think that the people who scream "this is purely (or even primarily) political not technical!" about decisions which clearly favour an NSP's stability and technical survivability are those people who also have very strong personalities but lack the technical acumen to affect the evolution of the Internet in general. On the other hand, those people who assert that the decisions are purely technical are probably being disingenuous. You may now feel free to quote some of my messages from previous lives if you like. It would serve me right. --:) Sean.