Cook’s Collaborative Edge

COOK’s Edge: Richard Bennett has been flaking the ITIF Foundations view on Net Neutrality for many months. He wandered into Nanog and very foolishly picked a fight there. The result at 8:39 this morning he wrote to Randy Bush

I didn’t bring this discussion over here, hippie.

COOK’s Edge: Not a wise move. Here is how it happened.

NANOG Evening of November 24: Richard Bennett wrote: I haven’t found a good source who knows what’s going on outside his own

Richard Steenbergen: Mr. Bennett,

You know when I first read your post, I assumed you were just ignorant and confused about the topic of peering on the Internet. Then I saw you actively refusing to listen to intelligent feedback by some of the most experienced network operators and peering managers in the industry, dismiss any idea that you didn’t agree with as part of the “Google conspiracy”, and further embarrass yourself with comments which proved you lacked understanding of even the most basic concepts of peering or inter-network traffic exchange. Normally I would just write you off as another Dean Anderson style nutjob, but I’m afraid that your ramblings are so wrong and your closed-mindedness is so severe that you are actually dangerous to anyone who might happen to read your comments and think that they are in any way correct. Therefore, I think it is important for all of us that you be refuted.

I’ll start with a few points from your post and comments. You said:

I’m not sure that your ‘on-net routes’ is the same product as the Paid Peering that Norton is interpreting; the Arbor study found a large increase in the traffic that moves through these transit bypass paths, and that’s the actual story. While this service may have been available for a while, its use is radically increasing. That’s data, BTW, not anecdote, so if you have a problem with the Arbor data, you’ll need some data of your own to refute it.

For starters, if you aren’t sure what “on-net routes” and “paid peering” even are, maybe you shouldn’t be trying to comment on them. Second, the Arbor study said absolutely NOTHING about an increase in traffic that moves via peering vs transit, to say nothing of paid vs settlement free peering. Arbor is completely and totally unable to identify anything about money exchanged for bits in general, and from a technical perspective there is absolute no difference between a paid and non-paid peering.

You seem to be convoluting the purported “increase in traffic between tier 2 networks” with a completely absurd belief that all traffic between tier 1’s was transit and all traffic between tier 2’s is peering. In reality, tier 2’s routinely buy from and sell to each other, peer with some tier 1’s, and sell paid peering between themselves when the business opportunities arise.

You later go on to state:

The Arbor study is evidence that traffic is shifting, and the carrier-neutral peering site managers I’ve spoken with tell me they’re making something like 300 cross-connects a month. Do you think all those cross-connnects are implementing settlement-free peering or conventional transit agreements? I’m surmising that they aren’t.

You have absolutely no basis to make the determination about what percentage of the crossconnects are peering and what percentage are transit. This is what we tried to explain to you with the “you can’t know this about any network but your own” answer, which you seemed completely incapable of understanding. The reality is that no one can know the answer for anything but themselves. For my network, I’d say much less than 20% of our cross connects are peering, with the vast majority being customers, and a significant amount being intra-network capacity (intra-pop, metro, and long-haul circuits) and transit. The number may vary between networks, but again you have absolutely zero basis to make any kind of claim about peering let alone settlement-free vs paid based on the number of cross connects in a colo.

Most of the other arguments are either meaningless or fall apart once you remove some of the fundamental misunderstandings above, but there are still plenty of other things which are completely absurd. For example, you said:

Paid peering is a better level of access to an ISP’s customers for a fee, but the fee is less than the price of generic access to the ISP via a transit network. The practice of paid peering also reduces the load on the Internet core, so what’s not to like? Paid peering agreements should be offered for sale on a non-discriminatory basis, but they certainly shouldn’t be banned.

Paid peering (or peering of any kind) is absolutely no guarantee of “better” access to any network, nor is it guaranteed (or even likely) to reduce costs. There is also no such thing as “load on the Internet core” to reduce, and this further illustrates a complete failure to understand how the Internet works in general.

Paid peering is simply another form of transit, where two networks agree to exchange money for the service of delivering connectivity. The only difference is that you’re only selling a portion of the routing table rather than the “whole thing”, for a specific subset of routes which have different properties than the rest. In the case of paid peering, the different property is that you’ll get to bill your customer on the other side for the traffic, thus allowing you to “double dip” for the same bit and potentially make more money.

Of course in practice it doesn’t work this way at all. The vast majority of the cost of operating a network is transporting the bits from one place to another, and when you sell paid peering you are guaranteed that the traffic is going to stay on your network and be hauled. This makes it some of the most expensive traffic to deliver, and typically results in prices which are higher than those of another network who is hot potatoing those bits off their network in one location, and who is sending the traffic to a settlement-free peer. There is nothing wrong with paid peering, it often has a time and a place (such as when two networks are close to being settlement-free peers, but not quite, and someone needs to sweeten the deal a little bit), but it is not the panacea you think it is. Of course nobody else seems to think the FCC Question 106 is talking about regulating paid peering (which would be absurd), so fortunately I don’t think we have anything to worry about.

Of course all of these points (and more) were already quite elegantly expressed by fine folks like Vijay Gill, Dan Golding, Patrick Gilmore, Joe Provo, and others. They tried to help correct your misinformation with free advice, and you repaid them with delusional rants. Now you simply look like a fool to everyone.

3:54 am Bennett: Thank you for your insights.

5:24 am William Allen Simpson: In summary, Mr Bennett is an unregistered lobbyist, employed by other registered lobbyists.

It’s really a waste of time to engage him, as it’s his full-time job to write his screed. We have neither the time nor manpower.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” — Upton Sinclair (1935)

[See his bio] http://www.itif.org/index.php?s=staff

He claims to have been involved in IEEE Wi-Fi for 15 years. Meaning he’s one of those responsible for the bad security (WEP, etc.), and the stagnation of ad hoc networking — because the industry has a centralized solution they want to sell, customer be damned.

His bio also says he was vice-chair for the hub standard, so prevented jumbo frames from being formally adopted — again, customer be damned.

Now, he works for a “think tank” called “Information Technology & Innovation Foundation”. Basically, he goes to conferences. He’s not responsible for operating any networks or doing any actual engineering.

ITIF doesn’t give out information about its funding, which usually means it’s industry lobbyist funded. Apparently in this case, big cable and probably big telco.

They’re opposed to net neutrality, and (based on his comments and several of the papers) still think the Internet is some kind of bastard child that needs adult supervision in the middle — by which they mean themselves /in loco parentis/.

Looking at the board, it’s populated by ultra-conservative wing-nut Republicans, and some Conservadems (as we call them in political circles, they call themselves “centrists”) from the “New Democrat Caucus” for “bi-partisan” cover. And lots of lobbyists — Federal lobbyists — who seem to list their educational clients on their bio, but not whether they are also employed by a firm that represents other clients….

7:25 am Paul Wall: Where can we find data on your group’s funding sources?

If we’re to continue this discussion, we need to establish bias and motive, which you’ve not covered on your own accord.

Aaron Cossey: Would you care to elaborate on how the investigation of someones funding sources is operationally relevant to the rest of the list?

7:47 am Randy Bush: please no we have a greedy troll. stop feeding it. procmail is your friend.

8: 39 AM Bennett:

I didn’t bring this discussion over here, hippie.

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