Subject: [RAM] Re/directed: [arch-d] It's the routing, people!

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2006 01:29:23 -0500

Shifting this to the presumably more appropriate forum...

On Nov 14, 2006, at 6:44 PM, Geoff Huston wrote:
> At 10:36 AM 15/11/2006, Noel Chiappa wrote:
>>     > From: Geoff Huston <[email-masked]>
>>
>>     > Generally pain (cost) and gain (benefits) need to be very  
>> directly
>>     > correlated for a deregulated and diverse industry to pick up  
>> and run
>>     > with the concept.
>>     > ... adoption is in itself a separable issue that requires  
>> particular
>>     > consideration in terms of identifying the cost and benefits  
>> that ensue.
>>
>> At one point it was suggested that people ought to be charged for  
>> routes (or
>> rather, that they be charged for occupying routing table slots).  
>> This never
>> took off, and I gather than in addition to the obvious policy  
>> issues (does
>> a popular destination have to pay rent, how do ISP's balance  
>> payments to
>> each other, etc, etc), it just didn't have much appeal in general.  
>> I assume
>> this is still the case?
>
> I recall this discussion back at a Dallas IETF CIDR WG meeting -  
> the issues where about route push vs route pull - how do you know  
> who should pay whom for routing entries?  It was never obvious  
> then, and still not obvious now the difference between a routing  
> economy and extortion! But I suspect that in general we are  
> economic neophytes, and there may well be more space to explore here.

Always more room to explore, but this is very tricky space. Yakov's  
Law should probably be understood as a subset of an even broader law:  
Code -- architecture, protocols, RIR rules, etc. -- can either define  
Law (what can and cannot be done at a reasonable cost), or Law can  
define Code; pick one. The Internet grew out of places where the  
former model dominated, and nominally technical features like layer 3  
transparency / application indifference, and the multihoming  
requirement* for participating in the AS mesh, helped to meliorate  
some of the more "extortionate" aspects and outcomes of competitive  
service provision. In commercial sectors that lack such Code-based  
constraints (and in the Internet also, in parts of the world where  
these BCPs are not observed), conventional Law defines the  
permissible limits of extortion, or else extortion (aka exercise of  
Significant Market Power) is often the norm. Anyone who wants to try  
to tackle the "economics without extortion" problem should probably  
keep this in mind.

>> Did you (or anyone) have any other suggestion(s) for ways we can
>> "incentivize" (to use that wonderful/horrible neologism) routing  
>> costs?

Wild speculation time...

Would geo-topo addressing be more palatable, and more amenable to  
legitimate TE requirements, if the geo-LIRs were subject to the same  
policy rules / discipline that's currently defined at the RIR level?  
Can anyone think of a good reason/justification/mechanism to encode  
competition for the default route within a geo-LIR area as an  
(institutional, or better yet technical) requirement for  
participation in the geo-LIR routing system?

With transport costs -- at least those related to routing/multihoming  
world -- falling through the floor, the market may well take care of  
routing and addressing concerns by driving regional/national network  
economies back into the shapes they had before the early/mid-1990s,  
when addressing, topology, and traffic exchange were quite explicitly  
geo-topo, and the upper bound for the "routing" problem was n!  
(number of nation states). Once we know which way  things are going  
to tip, it'll probably be too late... so maybe investigating  
solutions along these lines could help to hedge against both kinds of  
scary (expansionary, contractionary) futures...

> (Some years back an Australian election was fought with the key  
> phrase from one side being "incentivation" They lost the election.  
> Some would claim that the loss was related to the abuse of the  
> language!)
>
> I don't - I've thought about this on and off for many years, and if  
> there were easy solutions lying on the floor I'm sure that even I  
> would've stumbled over them by now. I've tried to poke this onder  
> the nose of some of the economists who venture into the same  
> meetings as we do, but its never got very far yet.
>
> Geoff

Maybe we should try harder this year? The distaste for these issues  
within the ops community seems to me abating a bit... I think...?

Tom

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