more on A battle for the soul of the Internet

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Suresh Ramasubramanian <suresh () hserus net>
Date: June 10, 2005 9:05:21 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Cc: jean_camp <jean_camp () harvard edu>
Subject: Re: [IP] more on A battle for the soul of the Internet


David Farber wrote:

> From: jean_camp <jean_camp () harvard edu>
>
> If Uganda wants to connect to the US under peering guidelines,    
> Uganda
> pays for the entire provision of the physical connectivity and  then
> pays to connect to the larger network.

That is settlement based peering, just one of the areas where this
debate is focused.  And an area where there's some justice in the claims
that small countries have to pay for lots of international bandwidth, as
most if not all the content they access is international - like for
example two people in the same city emailing each other on their hotmail
accounts.

There are a few other things, some of which have far wider ranging
implications -

* A proposal by the ITU-T to change the existing IP allocation policies,
to a system closely resembling the way telephone number prefixes are
allocated - with fixed quotas on a per country basis, and with countries
being the sole arbiter of how they allocate that IP space, as compared
to the current system of need based allocation by RIRs like RIPE, ARIN
and APNIC.

* Administration of the root servers and ccTLDs (especially US
government oversight on IANA and ICANN)

and some other proposals - but these three (settlement based peering,
which you described, and the ones I mentioned above) are key parts of
this issue.

Please see http://igov.apdip.net/ORDIG_Policy_Brief.pdf and
http://igov.apdip.net/ORDIG_Paper.pdf - short documents both of them,
one 5 pages and the other ~ 30 pages, but it tries to put forward a
balanced view on this issue, which recognizes two things -

* The Internet is critical infrastructure, and critical parts of this
(such as DNS, root servers etc) must not be affected in a desire to
change or reform the way they are run or managed

* Governments do have a stake in this for various reasons (if only for a
geniune desire to contribute to the process and do some good - the ITU
members are not all totalitarian dictatorships intent on siezing control
of the internet to repress their citizens - an argument I've seen raised
in several fora).  The goal should be to give them a meaningful role in
the governance of the internet, without polarizing it / causing damage

The ORDIG papers are definitely worth a read, and I would welcome IP
readers comments on these.

regards
suresh


-------------------------------------
You are subscribed as lists-ip () insecure org
To manage your subscription, go to
 http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip

Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/