Erik, I couldn't agree more. BBN (GTEI) is only doing what Sprint started doing about 3 years ago, when some associates of mine tried to turn up peering with them. All these arguments about traffic flow were used then, by so-called "engineers" no less! One place I worked I had to answer trouble calls from people who couldn't get to our customers, and customers who couldn't get to specific sites, to a particular four-letter network I won't mention. Their customers were NOT glad to hear that the reason they couldn't get to our customers was because the four-letter network had refused to peer. But the status-quo has changed. Remember the charter of the FCC, to regulate "scarce resource" communications. What happens when some brain-dead congress-crawler starts getting calls from their constituents that "we bought internet service but couldn't get to xyz!" Some staffer takes a 30 second look into the problem, and decides that peering is *so* overwhemed that in order for everyone to reach everyone else the Government should step in and regulate it. The 'Net gives some measure of universal connectivity because it was driven at its root by engineering. Who on NANOG, with any real world experience in networking, denies that maximum open peering benefits everyone? This decision, and the arguments in favor of pay-per-peer, has nothing to do with engineering. It has to do with paper-pushers who wouldn't know the difference between peering and transit if it were on 500 power-point slides, because they look at MONEY. They see "bits per second", and who they came from, and conclude that those packets are not sourced on their network and therefore someone should be paying for them specifically. And, when the engineering breaks because a political answer is trying to be imposed on a technical problem, and Little Jonhy can't get to www.Bob.com for his school assignment, the cry will go up to "protect the children" and regulation will fall faster than Madame LaFarge ever thought possible. Then those same "pay-per-peer" morons will get appointed to the governing body of Internet Communications, just like the Railroad Barrons of the late 19th Century, and history will endlessly repeat, again. Thanks, Erik, for the pointer on the AT&T monopoly. Do you have a source? Curt- ----- Begin Included Message -----

From: "Erik E. Fair" <fair@clock.org> Subject: Re: BBN Peering issues Sender: owner-nanog@merit.edu Content-Length: 1119

There is a customer perception, dating from the earliest days of the Internet that when you connect to the Internet, you will be able to reach all sites that are up, everywhere. That this is still mostly true is a tribute to the hard work of a lot people on this list, and elsewhere. So far, the cases for which this is not true are small in both number and relative importance. If this perception breaks down, watch out. Theodore Vail was allowed to create the regulated monopoly AT&T in the early part of this century on the promise of Universal Service, which meant not only that everyone had a telephone, but that *all* telephones could call *all* other telephones - one big, happy, PSTN. The Internet presents this kind of universality today without the regulation, but don't doubt for a second that if the ISPs (of whatever size) begin destructive pissing matches of the form "I'm bigger than you, pay me or we disconnect" that the FCC will be pressured to regulate the ISPs in such a way to guarantee the universal connectivity aspect of the Internet. Your customers will demand it. Erik <fair@clock.org> ----- End Included Message -----