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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.
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/
You might be able to drink away a hangover, but it's just going to result in a worse hangover later.
Not necessarily.
I'm not saying it's better than a hangover, but at least you can honestly say it isn't a hangover.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
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
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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