On Wed, Apr 1, 2020 at 12:54 PM Pengxiong Zhu <pzhu011@ucr.edu> wrote:

Sorry we didn’t know this is out of scope. What do you mean by baiting questions?

This is an operator list. Not an opened research discussion. Take it off the list. We are not very familiar with the peer protocol,

Then pay an expert to teach you. so we don’t know what questions can be discussed here or not. We are

researches, we just want to dig more to the cause of the slowdown that we observed.

You know it is the GFW. Pointing to other places is baiting. If you want to know how China Telecom does business ask them. Not us. If you want to say it is not the GFW, then write a paper about it. Dont send emails here. And we thought those questions are okay to ask here, which are not. But we

don’t want bait anyone.

It is not. Stop.

Sorry about the lack of knowledge of what can be discussed here.

Watch what others are talking about and add to it. Nobody else here is doing conversations like you.

Pengxiong

On Wed, Apr 1, 2020 at 12:34 PM Ca By <cb.list6@gmail.com> wrote:

...

This topic is out of scope for the list. Please stop emailing these baiting questions.

On Wed, Apr 1, 2020 at 12:27 PM Pengxiong Zhu <pzhu011@ucr.edu> wrote:

...

Hi folks,

We got plenty of positive responses in our last email regarding China's slow transnational network. Many are suggesting it is likely influenced by commercial decisions instead of censorship. It seems like the three Chinese ISPs don't really have enough peering internationally in Asia, and they have very strong bargaining power when it comes to peering.

Some suggest the cost of moving data to China is way lower if an ISP peers with US/European ISPs than directly with the Chinese ISPs. We assume the reason why those US/European ISPs offer cheaper prices is that they have settlement-free peering with Chinese ISPs. However, the "free-tier" capacity is simply not enough to handle the demand -- the US/European ISPs now have way more traffic going into China, thus saturating the link and causing congestion.

So we are wondering, do the Tier-1 US/European ISPs really have settlement-free peering with Chinese ISPs? If we want to do paid peering directly with the Chinese ISPs or purchase the full/partial transit, what is the price range?

From the BGP information, we know some of the peers of AS4134 (the biggest one) are: - Telia Carrier(AS1299) - Cogent Communications(AS174) - NTT Communications (America)(AS2914) - Level3(AS3356) - Tata Communications(America) Inc (AS6453) - Verizon Business/UUnet(AS701) - Zayo Bandwidth(AS6461) - AT&T Services, Inc.(AS7018) - GTT Communications Inc.(AS3257) - Comcast Cable Communications, LLC(AS7922)

It would be much appreciated if the operators of any such networks can give chime in. Thanks!

Regards, Pengxiong Zhu Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of California, Riverside

--

Best, Pengxiong Zhu Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of California, Riverside

No one suggested it isn’t censorship,

In fact, some replies suggested it’s more commercial actions. We said it's "likely influenced by commercial decisions", we didn't say censorship is out of the question. We still think censorship is the possible cause, but we run out of methods to verify it, that's why we switched to commercial actions to try our luck. If commercial actions don't seem to cause the slowdown, then it would be definitely censorship. Most of the performance hit is because of commercial actions, not

censorship.

When there is a tri-opoly, with no opportunity of competition, its easily

possible to set prices which are very different than market conditions. This is what is happening here.

Prices are set artificially high, so their interconnection partners wont

purchase enough capacity. additionally, the three don't purchase enough to cover demand for their own network. Results in congestion.

-- comment

what also doesn't help is that the Chinese carriers don't want to peer in

Asia, not even with globally transit-free tier-1 networks. Their closest point of interconnection is typically in Europe or the US, so thousands of miles away from the end user.

-- Anonymous comment

you’re bating here.

Once again we are confused by the accusation. We don't want to bait anyone for anything. Not deploying enough international capacity is absolutely a form or

censorship deployed to great avail

Yes we agree it is also a form of censorship. However, it is based on the assumption that China didn't deploy enough international capacity, which we don't have direct proof of it. On the contrary, from the stable performance of the traffic going out of China, it is very likely the assumption is not true. They might have enough physical capacity, but they don't make good use of it.

On Wed, 01 Apr 2020 12:47:22 -0700, Matt Corallo said:

No one suggested it isn’t censorship, you’re bating here. Not deploying enough international capacity is absolutely a form or censorship deployed to great avail - if international sites load too slow, you can skimp on GF appliances!

So.. who was being "censored" when a recent game release caused capacity problems and slow throughput for others? Censorship, *by definition*, is content-dependent. Capacity issues are either byte-count or packet-count dependent, and don't distinguish between pictures of huge rubber duckies in Tiananmen square, and pictures of Mount Kilimanjaro.

On Wed, 01 Apr 2020 20:58:17 -0700, Matt Corallo said:

If your goal is to force companies the world over to host domestically, where they follow local licensing regimes (yes, including censorship, as well as data access), it’s highly effective.

You missed the point. There's a distinction between "setting up conducive conditions" and "doing". Both may be morally problematic, but they're different things. Consider the US example of certain US companies who got caught giving the NSA a fiber connection at certain "interesting" points in the network - the legal exposure for the companies and for the intelligence agency were totally different. It's why our legal system recognizes the difference between committing a felony and being an accessory to the crime. We have *enough* trouble with people yelling "Censorship!" when Facebook or Quora or other social media sites owned by private actors enforce AUPs. Let's not let the word get further muddied into uselessness like "terrorism" has been over the last 2 decades.

Thank you for your understanding and your patience and kindness to explain it to us. We really appreciate it. We will keep that in mind and won’t ask this kind of questions again. Thanks again. Pengxiong On Wed, Apr 1, 2020 at 1:59 PM Tom Beecher <beecher@beecher.cc> wrote:

I do understand that you mean well, but do realize that interconnection between the rest of the world and the networks controlled by the Chinese government is a very, very sensitive and often touchy subject. It's also generally true that networks aren't going to disclose terms of commercial relationships on a public mailing list. ( By and large those terms aren't likely to be disclosed privately either. :) )

On Wed, Apr 1, 2020 at 3:28 PM Pengxiong Zhu <pzhu011@ucr.edu> wrote:

...

Hi folks,

We got plenty of positive responses in our last email regarding China's slow transnational network. Many are suggesting it is likely influenced by commercial decisions instead of censorship. It seems like the three Chinese ISPs don't really have enough peering internationally in Asia, and they have very strong bargaining power when it comes to peering.

Some suggest the cost of moving data to China is way lower if an ISP peers with US/European ISPs than directly with the Chinese ISPs. We assume the reason why those US/European ISPs offer cheaper prices is that they have settlement-free peering with Chinese ISPs. However, the "free-tier" capacity is simply not enough to handle the demand -- the US/European ISPs now have way more traffic going into China, thus saturating the link and causing congestion.

So we are wondering, do the Tier-1 US/European ISPs really have settlement-free peering with Chinese ISPs? If we want to do paid peering directly with the Chinese ISPs or purchase the full/partial transit, what is the price range?

From the BGP information, we know some of the peers of AS4134 (the biggest one) are: - Telia Carrier(AS1299) - Cogent Communications(AS174) - NTT Communications (America)(AS2914) - Level3(AS3356) - Tata Communications(America) Inc (AS6453) - Verizon Business/UUnet(AS701) - Zayo Bandwidth(AS6461) - AT&T Services, Inc.(AS7018) - GTT Communications Inc.(AS3257) - Comcast Cable Communications, LLC(AS7922)

It would be much appreciated if the operators of any such networks can give chime in. Thanks!

Regards, Pengxiong Zhu Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of California, Riverside

--

Best, Pengxiong Zhu Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of California, Riverside