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The Other Side of the Sprint Vs. Cogent Depeering
Swoolley writes "A month back this community discussed the Sprint vs. Cogent depeering. Now a story I wrote for Forbes.com tells the inside story of the fight, based on the lawsuits the two companies filed against each other in Virginia state court. For once, thanks to those suits, the public gets to see the details of a confidential peering agreement between two of the Internet's largest autonomous systems, as well as the circumstances leading up to the depeering. (Which company is in the right? Read the facts and decide for yourself.) While some people have argued that the depeering is reason for more government regulation, the Forbes story makes the case that details of the recent Cogent vs. Sprint fight argue for exactly the opposite: keeping the Internet backbones free of government meddling."
Is anyone else here tired of knee-jerk partisanship framing discussion in terms of false dichotomies? Government involvement can do a whole lot of good or a whole lot of bad. The devil is always in the details.
Good: regulate to prevent monopolization of last-mile utilities and reduce barriers to competition.
Bad: let lobbyists who supported your campaign write bills that hand out huge billion dollar tax breaks to carriers to build out the next generation "information superhighway" and sit idle while all of that money goes straight into the pockets of shareholders instead while countries like South Korea and Japani take the lead in broadband while America slowly turns into a broadband backwater.
Hopefully things will work out a little differently in the new administration.
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I don't know what others have been suggesting for regulation, but I would strongly support two simple regulations on depeering. 1) Provider A must give provider B at least X days notice of intent to depeer (say 180 days) 2) If some agreement isn't reached between provider A and provider B, both providers must notify all thier customers of the planned depeering giving thier customers at least X days notice (say 90) Nothing too invasive, just some basic comsumer protections.
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
Looking at the tags for this story (and many others), it seems tags are being used more for comments on the story than as a useful means to group stories by tag. For instance here we have the tags 'corporatewhining' and 'fuckemboth', both of which are most definitely a comment on the story, not a useful tag as such, well, not very useful as comment either, truth be told.
For that matter, the more useless a tag, the more likely it is to be of a derogatory nature.
That's pretty broken really, not even slightly useful as a feature.
Perhaps there should be a list from which people select, such as there is when submitting stories
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Pretty much.
...the Forbes story makes the case that details of the recent Cogent vs. Sprint fight argue for exactly the opposite: keeping the Internet backbones free of government meddling.
It is, in fact, inconceivable that Forbes would make any other case. Ideology predetermines their arguments, and in this case, the ideology at work is a sort of economic anarchism that, quite frankly, has been completely discredited by the current state of affairs in the US economy. Not all regulation is "government meddling"; some of it is necessary to protect consumers -- and often even vendors -- from dishonesty and short-sighted greed that is often harmful in the long run to the miscreants themselves.
It is at least mildly ironic that the proponents of economic anarchism are often simultaneously proponents of a hardline law-and-order position in other areas of law.
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Or they could have done nothing at all. One of the most helpful things for the business environment is stability. Knowing exactly what the government is going to do, because that's what it has always done, relieves a business from expending capital on adjusting to changing conditions.
Of course, no government would ever have done nothing, as the citizens wouldn't have stood for it. But, so long as we're spinning moonbeams...
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
You can't spend your way out of a bad economic cycle; that's like drinking more beer as a solution to a hangover.
While we're on analogies: Government stimulus packages don't - because the money they hand out has to come from somewhere. That somewhere is either additional money they tax away (typically from the most productive - the ones they were trying to "stimulate") or by "printing" (or equivalent) new money which gets its value by pulling value out of the money already out there. And the government handling of this money has costs. The stimulus is always less than the stifling.
So government "economic stimulus" is like trying to lengthen a blanked by cutting a strip off one end and sewing it onto the other. The blanket not only ends up no longer, but even a bit shorter.
(If not for that loss it would be like daylight savings time. B-) )
For more on this see the broken window falacy.
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This is Forbes, after all. According to Forbes, the Great Depression was proof of the need for less government regulation.
How would government regulation help in this case? Peering has to make economic sense for both parties or they wouldn't do it. All that happens after peering is broken is that the routers are reconfigured to send traffic over their transit links instead of the peer links. Ultimately, customers are not hurt (except for downtime because of an unplanned link outage).
The government has no business inserting itself into this agreement. The government is not in the business of understanding the economic conditions that provoke peering agreements.
I recall reading an article a few years ago about how Yahoo gets approximately half of it's total bandwidth for free. It makes economic sense for content providers to peer with content consumers. This is where the net neutrality thing breaks down. Large content providers make sure they create links that make sure their content gets to eye balls quickly. The smaller content providers don't get this privilege unless they use content caching services or they find a co-lo that has a network with plenty of peering agreements already in place. Is it unfair? Yeah, so? That's how the chips fall.
If Verizon finds out that enough of their customer traffic is destined to Cogent, it only makes sense for them to peer. Both Cogent and Verizon have a huge number of peering agreements and I wouldn't be surprised if not having this agreement in place really makes that much of a difference to either one of them.