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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."
This is Forbes, after all. According to Forbes, the Great Depression was proof of the need for less government regulation.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
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.
TurnKey Linux: if it can be easy, it should be easy
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
This is not the first time Cogent act like bandits.
http://gigaom.com/2008/03/18/cogent-ceo-peering-breakdown-is-telias-fault/
When this story broke two months ago, the Sprint claim was that Cogent was having an unbalanced share of the traffic, and that was given as reason for depeering; mostly due to Cogent signing up large numbers at 10% of the price of Sprint and the other tier 1 ISPs. Makes you wonder if Forbes has an axe to grind there now.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
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
Had the federal government responded initially by cutting taxes and spending, lowering trade barriers and streamlining regulation, it probably would have been just a very bad recession. You can't spend your way out of a bad economic cycle; that's like drinking more beer as a solution to a hangover. What you need to do is calm things down, encourage trade and not experiment with the economy and organizing society. I'm not going to say that the federal government caused the Great Depression, but it certainly didn't do anything positive to stop it and return the economy back to sanity.
You can't spend your way out of a bad economic cycle; that's like drinking more beer as a solution to a hangover.
That's a great analogy! You might be able to drink away a hangover, but it's just going to result in a worse hangover later.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
When *I* kill a peering, the traffic is rerouted through the Internet. Please don't tell me Cogent and Sprint don't use BGP! So why did traffic stop flowing?
i am actually for some regulation. not really of any content, but to force the larger companies to be more open. fact is, the Internet/phone backbone was built using taxpayer money. if that is the case, then the taxpayers have a vested interest in competition and choosing their providers. minimally, all public institutions should be on a government owned/operated network.
large companies like Sprint have paid off enough local FCC chairs that they are now deregulated, and are gladly unplugging all other ISPs that don't belong to the top 6 or 7. fees just to open the plug-in process are over $10,000 a month, and the bigger ISPs aren't even required to do anything. many local companies here have spent $10,000 for several months, having an open account with AT&T, and AT&T is allowed to sit on their hands because they can. you can pay $10,000 to AT&T and request that they hook you up at the local CO, and they will gladly take the money and say "Thanks for making a formal request", and that is it. end of story.
and here in Oklahoma, AT&T is even double billing the local schools and libraries, but the FCC won't do anything about it. AT&T has a contract in Oklahoma to provide schools/libraries with connections for a certain base price, but because the schools/libraries get and pay their own bills, AT&T sends them bills with higher rates, knowing that the local mayoral staff won't have any clue on what they are supposed to pay.
truth is, we should have an easy way to link into a system that was built with taxpayer money. and we need to actually be able to VOTE on what these big ISPs do, and not rely on the incredibly corrupt state FCC.
You started off that post great, but it all went downhill in the "Bad:" section.
Using tiny, *tiny*, whole countries as an example is flawed. Over 90% of Japanese live in less than 20% of the total area Japan occupies. To illustrate further, the US could easily bring New York City into the 'fiber to your door' reality for about the same cost of the entire country of Japan. Unfortunately for your argument, 90% of Americans don't live in New York City, or rather, in 2% of the area of the entire USA.
If that were true, it would be very cost effective and easy to roll-out new technologies. This is the same reason that the Japanese didn't get charged when ISDN was rolled out to the entire country, and the same for DSL.
Next time try comparing apples to apples.
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.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Cogent argue that under the terms of the contract they passed. They kept the link open at their end because as far as they were concerned they had passed and Sprint was simply following its end of the bargain. They're arguing that they don't have to pay because if Sprint really didn't think they had passed, they could have severed the link at their end.
The confusion is because both sides measured the performance in different ways. From Sprints' complaint:
Cogent unreasonably claimed that the amount of interconnection traffic satisfied the
utilization threshold requirement in the Trial Agreement because the port utilization peak figures
for each of the ten ports (used to calculate billing) exceeded the average utilization criteria across
all ports. Cogent ignored that Paragraph 5.E. required a sustained threshold average utilization
across all ports for the entire period, and instead focused on snapshot figures based on the
commercial pricing model of peak usage. As a result, Cogent argued that it was entitled to
settlement-free peering with Sprint.
I find it hard to believe that Cogent walked away from negotiations with the wrong idea about how the test was going to be measured. In any business negotiations both sides go to great pains to make sure everyone understands what's being agreed because otherwise it winds up in court like this. If the judge takes the view that Cogent was mislead (deliberate or not) then this becomes a big PITA for Sprint.
So yea, a balls-up for both parties.
Nick
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.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
> This is Forbes, after all. According to Forbes, the Great Depression was proof of the need for less government regulation.
Too many Libertarians here will actually agree with that. Let's put that another way that Slashdotters might understand:
This is Forbes. They had Daniel Lyons writing about how SCO would win against those Communist Linux hippies.
The real question on regulation is if it does more good than harm. The easiest way for me to think about it is as a controls system.
It can be underdamped (no regulation), meaning that the industry will go to extreme highs and lows as companies go for short term profits and take advantage of monopolistic opportunities only to be bitten in the ass by those same policies later. Any slight impact on the industry will send companies fortunes flying high or crashing low. There is also little need to innovate since once you have secured your position you can simply remain there until a competitor begins to make inroads on your market.
It can also be overdamped (too much regulation), meaning that the government is so involved that it is slowing innovation and holding companies to the same playing field even if one has a much better product than the others. Industries will be slow to recover from negative effects and slow to take advantage of new opportunities as they wait for the regulation to catch up with changing technologies.
Of course, it is technically possible for a system to be perfectly damped, where regulation would protect the industry from wild swings while still allowing innovation to flourish. Of course, this is the knife edge that is nearly impossible to walk, especially tech industries that are constantly changing.
In the US, it would seem to me that we are underdamped, telcos are taking short term profits rather than improving infrustructure. If the government could reduce the cost of entry into the market or legislate a maximum cost / bandwidth it would improve the infrustructure immensely.
You do realize, I hope, that you are citing the conclusion of your hypothesis as proof of it?
As long as we're on speculative economics in an alternate history, would you care to address the events of 1937-1938?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
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.
Regulation is required to get some transparency and a better sense of confidence into markets. CDO's are the perfect example.
How big is the market for CDO's? What's the liability to investors? Were counterparties *required* to put up capital? What are the terms of the CDO agreements? What kind of leverage is there in CDO's?
None of those questions can be answered at this time and yet once-mighty investment banks literally vanished overnight with unknown leverage conditions.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
History has shown a country can and has spent their way out of recession(s). It was called the WPA. Learn a little history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Shameless self promotion: This article at Ars Technica explains how peering and transit works. For some more info see my blog: Internet Thought.
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If you just put a pile of money out in the street, sure, nothing will change, but your analogies are just that. History and reality are better barometers of effective policy.
If the government employs people to improve infrastructure, it lowers the cost of doing business and benefits the whole economy, while evening out the down cycle when other businesses are cutting back. The biggest reasons western countries do well as economies are their workers and their infrastructure and their reliance on government technology and protectionism. While America unfortunately does not see the benefit of having a well educated populace, it does see the benefit of having a reliable power grid, sewage system, telecommunications network, etc. Some societies see single payer health care as part of infrastructure, which is the main reason it's cheaper to build a car in Canada than it is in Detroit.
(Here's an article that discusses two facts unknown to most Americans: our car companies employ more people in Ontario than Michigan, and they do it because of their more efficient health care system and the canadian dollar.)
In fact, the computer you're typing on and the internet it travels over are all due to government research. Do you imagine we would be less prosperous if China had been the ones who were licensing technology for us to manufacture instead of the other way around? Government is capable of doing good things, but not in the hands of those who attend to the needs of corporations instead of people.