From an American perspective, the simple way of looking at this is that as BT/MCI and UUNET increase the amount of transoceanic capacity, their networks become more valuable. This in turn will allow them to continue making a sensible argument for charging for

Sometimes I go reading through email with UCB Mail just to see what my Gnus 5.4.x (http://www.gnus.org/) splits and scorefiles are hiding from me, and to reassure myself that modern Gnus is so excellent a mail and news reader that it's worth using Emacs to enjoy it. (I heartily recommend the newsreader to anyone trying to follow anything on the NANOG mailing list, btw. The threading scheme is great -- You can type T l to lower the score of a thread and can do neat things like scoring down particular individuals (L A) and anything following up to them (L F), and all of this happens nice and quickly using the nnml mail backend, as it uses .overview files. I no longer see all sorts of crap. Gnus has changed my life.) Sometimes reading unfiltered email leads me into replying to something that ordinarily I would never have seen. This is one of those times. Bear in mind that this is being written with an American (or more generally North American) audience in mind. This should probably have gone to com-priv, but hopefully things will stay in a more north american engineering frame of mind than what is usually found there. Jim Fleming wrote: | 1. What is the official Root Name Server configuration | endorsed by NANOG ? NANOG does not endorse anything. This is a failing. Moreover, surely this would be something more appropriate for IEPG, for a more global perspective, rather than just focusing on one regional group of operators. | 3. How do you feel about moving the Root Name | Servers out of the United States ? Are you concerned | about the performance issues ? Having more root nameservers outside the USA is an excellent idea. There is nothing particularly new to this -- there has been a root nameserver at NORDUNET for some time. I trust that BIND will adapt to the vagaries of various network bottlenecks. Paul Vixie is a clever coder. Trans-oceanic botlenecks are a real issue, however, and with the current ICM award about to wind down, the question arises about who pays for poor connectivity to where. Assuming that capacity bottlenecks between North America and Asia becomes an operational issue to North American network operators (could be), they would obviously be able to adopt one of three approaches: -- hide head in sand, hope that other people (namely non-Americans) pick up the cost of the no-longer-subsidized U.S. half-circuits, and continue increasing their own capacity at their own cost. -- purchase their own connectivity to exchange points in Europe (such as KTH in Stockholm and LINX in London -- note that each of these two exchange points has a root nameserver in the same facility) -- cut a deal with someone like BT/MCI, UUNET or the like to use their trans-oceanic capacity The third approach is straightforward -- become a customer of a big global network and trust that customer and other market pressures will keep them expanding globally such that capacity issues don't become overwhelming. The second approach is straightforward too, and is I imagine what people clamouring for peerings at U.S.-based exhcange points so that they can be Independent Big Networks should begin planning for. That is, if you don't want to become a customer of, say, BT/MCI or UUNET or the like and you don't want to find yourself being able to reach fewer and fewer locations or more and more likely to face settlement charges from those big providers, acquiring independent capacity to remote exchange points is a good idea. Examining this a bit more closely, since undersea capacity is terribly expensive, when there is adequate capacity available to a large aggregate of sites people want to get to, there will be an obvious market for access to that capacity. As BT/MCI or UUNET or whoever increases the size of their pipes and aggregates more things behind those pipes, the ability to charge more on either end for transit through those pipes will increase. peering that includes access to their non-local (i.e., non-American) customer base. Looking at it from a higher point of view, there is the problem of many geographically separated exchange points where a there are sets of providers who cannot talk to each other because there is no common exchange point. However, unlike in North America, the cost of even relatively small amounts of bandwidth is still very high for trans-oceanic capacity. This results in a market opportunity for people who can aggregate (and likely oversell) that expensive capacity to the disjoint sites. There is the issue of keeping customers happy, as has been mentioned, but salami tactics work nicely. In fact, when dealing with expensive transoceanic capacity, it works better, especially when customers are presented with the option of subsidizing (through increasing customer fees) their routes being presented to a small network in America who refuses to pay for their share of the transoceanic capacity. Finally, there's the third approach. It might be workable, but at some point Europeans and Asians will tire of always increasing the amount of money they put into transoceanic circuits and start becoming either customers of bigger, cheaper providers (or members of consortia or associations which accomplish similar cost-savings) or start coming to the same understanding: access to trans-oceanic capacity while it continues to be hiddeously expensive should be paid for at both ends, since both sides benefit. This has been seen to some degree in the past; there are a number of cases where a relatively unsaturated high bandwidth line was made available only conditionally -- one had to be a research network or had to be a friend of someone or other in order to use the big pipe otherwise one would use the much more saturated thinner pipes across the oceans. Seeing messages fly about saying, "Dear brand new AS 8888, if you pay us 200 ECU per month to cover our costs we will carry your routes across the nice fat pipe between our popular network and MAE-EAST, otherwise good luck finding acceptable (or any) transit bandwidth" (only more polite, of course) will not surprise me. So, the answer to the question is, yes, you should be concerned about performance issues, and yes, you should be working on a tractable scalable engineering plan for both North American and intercontinental connectivity, and this should take into account other people's real and perceived costs. In other words, kids, the increasing number of root nameservers outside the U.S.A. is a sign that the Internet is internationalizing. Engineer for that now, or you're probably in for a bumpy ride as various governments including your own stop subsidizing your connectivity elsewhere. Sean.