Subject: RE: The Natural Entropy of the Internet?

From: "Tony Li" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 23:34:40 -0700

Folks,

Thank you all for the intriguing discussion.  Sorry I haven't
been around to play, I've been off being a Scum Sucking
Bottom Feeding Vendor again.  ;-)

I would like to take the opportunity to try to uplevel this
discussion a bit.  All of the discussions about how we
should architect and implement software are charming, but the
fundamental question that we should be wrestling with is at
a higher level: what is the role of the IETF in making
technical decisions that affect not only the Internet but 
many IP networks elsewhere that are not necessarily connected?

In Ye Olden Days, when we were young and naïve, we felt that
we got to decide.  Eric remembers this:

	Fortunately this  is the IETF  not the ITU-T,  and we 
	make our decisions by dint of technical deliberations 
	rather than by having a popularity contest. 

However, that age passed away a long time ago.  If you
weren't watching carefully, that age died at Kobe and we held
the funeral in Boston.  We still mourn its passing.

The IETF today has to deal with complex commercial pressures
from both vendors and operators, there are politics aplenty,
and compromise is the name of the game.  When the politics are
too close to call, we simply let the market decide.  We have
a very hard time saying no, because anytime that the IETF says
no, someone loses and doesn't necessarily do so gracefully.
Thus, when we total up the forces driving a decision, we 
look at all of the contributing factors and if the net sum is
positive, there's a new RFC.

This is reality.  We don't have to like it, but we do have to
live with it.  Wake up and smell the coffee.  Deal.

Today, with the carriers in disarray, the commercial pressures
are overwhelming.  Profitability is the watchword and technical
elegance and rationality are certainly in the back seat (if 
they are still even on the bus -- which I sometimes doubt).
In this particular case, the market has already decided what it
wants (with some vendor influence) and technical matters did
not intrude on the process.  To try to influence the decision
at this point will largely be in vain.  At the very least, what
do we offer to counter the commercial pressures of doing VPNs
based on the Internet infrastructure?  Without something at 
least as weighty as market forces, we seem to be at something
of a disadvantage.

While it's true, we might be able to color some of the low
level implementation details, at the higher level, no matter of
the outcome, these applications will be placed squarely on the
shoulders of the routing subsystem.  This may be ill-advised,
but can the IETF say 'no' and make it stick?  That would seem
unlikely in the extreme.

What can we do and how can we make use of our resources?  
Is fiddling around with "The Clone of BGP" going to help us
do anything other than produce a B-grade monster flick?  Our
only upside here is our ability to influence deployments of
the technology.  To make all carriers aware of the implications
of their choices, not only to their own infrastructures, but
to the Internet as a whole.  We need to give them an alternative
that removes the yoke of VPNs from routing entirely.  Let's not
waste our breath micro-optimizing our architectures to bear an
inappropriate load, let's do what we need to do to shoulder
it for now and use our energy to move past this to a better
solution at the architectural level.

Regards,
Tony

_______________________________________________
routing-discussion mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/routing-discussion

---

From: "Tony Li" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 23:34:40 -0700

Folks,

Regards,
Tony