Also, aren’t you being paid by big cable/telco?

I should state first that I agree the tone of “Dr. Peering”‘s comment was less that polite. I do not know who wrote it, and I hope everyone will note that not one of my posts had such a tone.

Unfortunately, whatever the tone of the comment, the substance is a genuine reflection of how many professionals in the field feel about Bill Norton’s white papers. Having read his original drafts before publication, I can tell you they are riddled with errors, some due to lack of experience, some from vast oversimplification.

Bill tries hard to explain complex ideas to people, a laudable goal, and many of us tried to help him in the past. But despite his prolific white-paper publication record, Bill Norton is not an expert in. The fact Richard believes Bill is an expert only shows, yet again, that Richard is not.

Also, most of the people posting here are not “peering coordinators”. That Richard harps on this again & again, despite being told otherwise repeatedly, proves not only his ignorance of the issues and people involved, but his inability to either research or even read. There is one person who made a comment here and is a peering coordinator, but she knows a metric ass ton about policy, putting to lie Richard’s comments even when he is talking about peering coordinators.

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TTFN,
patrick

I can see why you’re posting this anonymously. This is some of the most vile and libelous comment on a public forum I’ve ever seen.

Could you please site some examples?

“the fee is less than the price of generic access to the ISP via a transit network”

Examples and sources here too, please.

“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.”

It has hard to argue this point when your previous two statements are missing citations.

Please don’t quote Norton either, we’ve already proven he’s not an expert on this subject.

So yes, the FCC is considering whether and in what form the net neutrality regulations should extend into the peering and transit space; one reason they hired Doug Sicker is for his expertise in this area, as he’s a former chief architect for Level 3. So no, it’s not at all unreasonable to consider this question, whether one happens to be a peering coordinator or not.

You keep ignoring what the actual debate, the ORIGINAL debate is about. The question that Norton (followed up by me and Bennett) raised was not to get into a semantics argument about what’s new/old, what is/isn’t paid peering, and who is and isn’t an expert. Never did any of us imagine we’d get into a flame war like this and some of the attacks here have gotten beyond ludicrous.
The key question is whether it is wise for the FCC Net Neutrality regulation to regulate Paid Peering. In the paper that you coauthored two years ago, you warned about the dangers of Net Neutrality trying to regulate and prohibit interconnects and Paid Peering in the name of ending “discrimination”. Now that we are actually facing these concerns about interconnect regulation from the FCC NPRM (and trust me when I say we have more inside sources than you), Bill Norton has raised the flag.
Now you and a bunch of folks come here and say Bennett and Norton are wrong and you attack them claiming that they are not experts (even though you cited Bill Norton at least 6 times as a peering expert two years ago). But why go down this road of character assassination in the first place? If you want to disagree with our interpretation, that’s fine. But why be so defensive that someone would suggest that we get clarification from the FCC and debate this thing in public which is exactly what the FCC has asked us to do?
What’s the worst thing that can happen if we debate this? The FCC will come out and say Norton’s interpretation was wrong and there was no intention of regulating/prohibiting certain types of interconnects? Now what if Norton was right, and we all sat around and said nothing as the FCC starts banning Paid Peering? That’s essentially what you and JZP are saying, that we should just shut up about it because we don’t know anything.
Really, I don’t get the source of this animosity. If all of us agree that an FCC ban on Paid Peering would be bad, then why can’t we come together on this one simple point? We can agree to disagree on interpretations, but let’s ask for clarification and wait and see.

I said in my 600 word blog post: “Paid peering illustrates how hard it is to write an anti-discrimination rule for the Internet that doesn’t have harmful side effects for all but the largest content networks. 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.”

and you said in your conclusion:

“We also have a cautionary conclusion: if one should be motivated (for whatever reason) to contemplate some regulatory rule to manage interconnection (which the debate over Net Neutrality is, in part, about), the design of such a rule will be both complex and informationally demanding. Any simplistic rules that try to define network neutrality as the elimination of discrimination will fail even to match today’s reality by a wide margin. There is a substantial level of economic discrimination today just in the variation in willing to peer, and the emergence of paid peering and partial transit only increase this space. Partial transit and paid peering may be seen as efficiency-enhancing responses to changing market conditions.”

Is there a contradiction?

The question isn’t whether paid peering and partial transit are new in the peering space; they’re “new” in the policy space insofar as the regulators are just now learning about them (I exempt Doug Sicker from this group of regulators, as he obviously understands these things quite well.) So I’d encourage you to get off the tangent that Google’s man started and join the real discussion.

Even assuming your interpretation of the paper (private peering is new when the paper was published), you are years late to the party. This is nearly 2010, that paper was published in 2007. Are you still claiming that something that paper noted years ago is now a new phenomenon? Do you have any idea how long 2-3 years is on the Internet? When Peyman first brought us all together to discuss the paper, Comcast did not have a cohesive background, and Google had not bought YouTube.

The thread of these comments has wound around to the point where I cannot even tell where you stand. Wherever it is though, I am sure it is not any place I recognize.

You accuse me of arguing against a paper I published years ago, yet you cannot see it contradicts you.

When Peyman & I cite Bill, you claim this makes Bill an authority. Yet when Bill cites me or Richard S., we have no authority.

You talk to a colo provider, they say there are 300 x-conns / month, you assume a bunch are paid peering. When people who actually ordered and used those x-conns tell you very few are for paid peering, you disagree.

Etc., etc.

You deny reality. You resist logic. Your understanding of how Internet networks interconnect is woefully inadequate, and worse, factually incorrect. Both eyeball networks and content networks, NN advocates and critics, large companies and small, they all tell you you are wrong. But instead of listening to everyone, you staunchly resist everyone. I’m not sure which side you are taking, but whoever it is, they are not taking your side.

“It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument.” -William G. McAdoo, lawyer and politician (1863-1941)

Good advice.

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TTFN,
patrick

The paper cites Bill Norton 6 or 7 times.

Do you now think you were wrong, or are you upset that I didn’t cite you to begin with? I wish I had, but I only had 600 words to work with; maybe next time.