-----Original Message----- From: Tomas L. Byrnes Sent: Tuesday, November 04, 2008 4:08 PM To: 'Niels Bakker' Subject: RE: Sprint v. Cogent, some clarity & facts There was nothing in my post advocating free transit or peering. I merely pointed out that peering only without downstream propagation was a technical error, based on the proper implementation of the protocols as designed. All the discussion of practicality and politics are implementation failures: the first because of crappy routers, the second because of the established player issue you called out. We've all had enough of crappy networks causing unreachability.

-----Original Message----- From: Niels Bakker [mailto:niels=nanog@bakker.net] Sent: Tuesday, November 04, 2008 9:30 AM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Sprint v. Cogent, some clarity & facts

* tomb@byrneit.net (Tomas L. Byrnes) [Tue 04 Nov 2008, 17:51 CET]:

...

The concept of "Transit Free" is a political failure, not a technical one.

Yeah, networks should be free! And Cogent, if they don't get access to Sprint directly, should just set a default route over some public IX where Sprint is also present at to reach their network!! And then hack their routers to do likewise.

...

The protocols are designed, and the original concept behind the Internet is, to propagate all reachability via all paths. IE to use Transit if peering fails.

Yeah, the original concept of the internet. Like classful IP routing.

...

Not doing so is a policy decision that breaks the redundancy in the original design.

Because the original design totally had in mind established players locking out cheaper newcomers and explicitly specified a maximum band where prices for transit had to exist inside of.

Please stop it. We've had enough.

-- Niels.

-- "We humans get marks for consistency. We always opt for civilization after exhausting the alternatives." -- Carl Guderian