Re: Richard Bennett, NANOG posting, and Integrity

[Dorian Kim <dorian () blackrose org>]

On Jul 28, 2014, at 12:36 PM, Bill Woodcock <woody () pch net> wrote:

> On Jul 28, 2014, at 9:28 AM, William Herrin <bill () herrin us> wrote:
> > The data set suffers three flaws:
>
> Depending on your point of view, a lot more than three, undoubtedly.
>
> > 1. It is not representative of the actual traffic flows on the Internet.
>
> There are an infinite number of things it’s not representative of, but it also doesn’t claim to be representative of 
> them.  Traffic flows on the Internet is a different survey of a different thing, but if someone can figure out how to 
> do it well, I would be very supportive of their effort.  It's a _much_ more difficult survey to do, since it requires 
> getting people to pony up their unanonymized netflow data, which they’re a lot less likely to do, en masse, than 
> their peering data.  We’ve been trying to figure out a way to do it on a large and representative enough scale to 
> matter for twenty years, without too much headway.  The larger the Internet gets, the more difficult it is to survey 
> well, so the problem gets harder with time, rather than easier.

This most likely won’t happen unless it becomes some sort of an international treaty obligation and even then it would 
end up in courts for a long time. Leaving aside data privacy requirements many carriers have, most companies guard 
their traffic information rather zealously for some reason.

-dorian