On Thu, 11 January 2001, Rodney Joffe wrote:

I also don't believe that it was a coincidence that Genuity/GTE was the first to make a public statement of it's peering policy.

Sometimes I think "Internet Time" also applies to its long term memory. One of the reasons why I asked for copies of old peering policies is because essentially every major provider has publically announced their policy at one time or another in the last decade. Saying "First" about anything should mean more than the last 18 months. InternetMCI had their peering policy on their web site for several years (1995-1996) prior to its acquisition by Worldcom. I believe InternetMCI removed their peering policy from its public web site about the time Farouq took over peering at MCI. The first peering battle was ANS. The agreement was brokered by BBN arranging for ANS to connect to the CIX router. At that point, the definition of "being on the Internet" changed from being connected to the NSFNET to being on the commercial Internet, and the set of providers supplying commercial Internet service. The second peering battle was one of packet loss. Sprint tried to make things as painful as possible by never upgrading its connection to the CIX router above a T1. So even though other providers were exchanging traffic at 34Mbps to 45Mbps, Sprint kept their quality of service limited to 1.5Mbps at the CIX. This one was never directly resolved. But by this time most providers were exchanging a majority of their traffic via MAE-East. Around this time BBN transitioned from being a customer of InternetMCI to being a peer of InternetMCI using its connections via several old NSF regional networks (BARRNET, SURANET and NEARNET). BBN and MCI may have had the first "private" circuit peering. Because InternetMCI had sold connectivity as a loss-leader to the old NSF regionals, some folks throught MCI was happy to get out of the customer contract. The third peering battle involved disconnectivity. BBN was one of the first providers to terminate its connection to the CIX router, which had previously acted as the peering point of last resort, and began the second round of peering disputes. When all the major providers connected to the CIX, it was difficult for any provider not to peer because the CIX router always offered a way to exchange traffic. In less than three months, BBN, MCI and Sprint actions eliminated CIX as the router of last resort. It should be noted, UUNET has maintained its connection to the CIX router. Any provider interested in exchanging traffic with UUNET has always had the option of sending traffic via the CIX. This option does not exist for Genuity or Sprint. The fourth peering battle involved AGIS announcing its new peering policy at the least NANOG meeting held at the University of Michigan. It generated a lot of noise, but eventually AGIS's peering policy became irrelevant. Towards the end, AGIS was actively trying to get peering with new providers. The fifth peering battle involved UUNET. UUNET notified some number, I've heard between 10 and 20, providers UUNET would terminate their peering. At this time in the Internet's history only a few providers had written peering agreements. There were very few NDA's involved with peering before this time. It probably wasn't a breach of NDA, but someone leaked the story to the press. UUNET eventually was able to shutdown the story, but that lead to the next problem. Everything is a secret, so people imagine things were in peering agreements. The sixth peering battle involved once again BBN/GTE and the MCI/Worldcom merger. GTE worked very diligently to bring the issue of peering to the attention of regulators in the US and Europe. Eventually the EU Commission issued administrative inquires of all the major providers about the nature of the agreements, the amount of traffic, the types of connections and so forth. In the end, the nature of peering agreements wasn't clarified, but Worldcom had to spin off its InternetMCI division to Cable & Wireless. The seventh peering battle involved again BBN/Genuity/GTE and Exodus. This time it was the battle over imbalanced traffic flows. BBN and Exodus had a dispute, but it was settled and as they say on TV the terms were not announced. The imbalance issue has come up a few more times with other providers such as PSI, Abovenet and others. So, even though some folks like to point to UUNET as the big bully on the block, if you look at history; BBN has more often than not been the power behind the throne in these peering battles.