Re: A Public Option for the Core

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

(Bcc to the IETF list and Cc to the architecture-discuss list)

Thanks for circulating this.

On 12-Aug-20 06:50, Lars Eggert wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Scott Shenker et al. just presented a pretty thought-provoking "public option" for the Internet's core backbone at SIGCOMM: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3387514.3405875

Hmm.

"The technical Internet community has long embraced the notion
that the Internet should be application-neutral; that notion later
became known as network neutrality (a term coined in [57])."

I dispute that assertion. "Network neutrality" is a slippery term,
but certainly there is antipathy between some interpretations of it
and RFC2474 and other QoS technologies.

"We choose instead to initially create the POC’s backbone network out
of a set of leased lines, and use the interconnections to one or more
ISPs as a fallback if the POC’s backbone does not have sufficient
connectivity."

That sounds like a fairly accurate description of the Internet in
about 1995, when ISPs had emerged but the de facto backbone was still
largely non-profit and/or settlement-free. And note that non-profit
transit networks existed then, and actively migrated to a for-profit
model after about 1998. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBONE for
an example.

So I think history would likely repeat itself if this proposal was
adopted.

Maybe it's time to update https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-carpenter-metrics
Reactions to that draft from the then major transit ISPs were interestingly
negative.

   Brian

> 
> If you scroll down (or go to https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3387514.3405875#sec-supp), his recorded talk video gives a high-level overview.
> 
> (PDF and video *should* be open access and work for me, but you never know with the ACM...)
> 
> Lars
>