I have posted sa comment on this from ISOC England on
http://www.isoc-ny.org/p2/?p=134
Please feel free to add comments there.
If anyone has questions about this, the "invited experts" who managed to
wedge their feet in the door at the Kampala meeting were myself, Nishal
Goburdhan (AfriNIC), and Michuki Mwangi (ISOC). Any of us would be happy
to discuss it. We were there by the grace of the U.S. delegation, which
fights the good fight on the Internet's behalf in intergovernmental
negotiations like this.
Note that there's another big fight coming up over whether the ITU should
be allowed to screw up IP address allocation and aggregation. They're not
just trying to screw up BGP. Badness abounds.
-Bill
There is also a discussion of this going on on the IETF discuss list.
Regards
Marshall
Could you post a summary, in appropriate technical terms, of precisely what is being requested, and what changes to BGP they want?
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
Really.
I can read tea leaves with the best of them, and the tea leaves I see tell me the reporter (in the story the blog points to) doesn't have a clue. What is the substance of the proposal?
Depending on objectives, I would expect that this means that China wants to look at routers (which run BGP), and
(a) use IPFIX-or-something to measure traffic rates and charge for trans-China transit,
(b) use interface statistics to measure traffic rates and charge for trans-China transit,
(c) tax Chinese ISPs for transit services they provide, or maybe
(d) use IPFIX-or-something to map communication patterns.
It would be (d) that the reporter might seriously want to worry about.
But what is all this about "is the ITU interested in changing BGP"? If the word "metering" makes any sense in context, BGP doesn't meter anything.
Or using BGP to carry charging information, so that ISPs could use that in their policies? Or charging end-to-end, rather than for transit?
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
I tried to read this article earlier today, but my lolwut meter exploded.
It's not really clear whether the confusion in this article is caused by
poor understanding on the part of the journalist, the ITU, the European
Commission, the UK parliament or China. What is clear is that the article
makes very little sense, other than to note that both China and the ITU
like the idea of billing for bits at national borders.
China, being the sort of state that it is, is perfectly welcome to impose
restrictions like metering for traffic and imposing billing regimes on
international players. The net result of this will probably be to trash
China's network international connectivity, as the rest of the world mouths
a collective "whatever, dude..." and then goes back to reading their less
spamful inbox.
The ITU, for its part, seems to be involved in a desperate bid to make
itself relevant to the internet world - an ironic position, considering
they did their level best to squat on the internet in the early 90s and
ignore it in the late 90s and early noughties. Part of this desperation is
manifesting itself as a movement by a number of countries to introduce
international tariffing of internet bits and bytes at country borders. For
some reason, this peculiar notion appears to make sense to governments and
national telcos - presumably because that's how it works in the PSTN world.
If all you have is a nail, everything looks like a hammer.
This isn't the only irrelevant absurdity being proposed by the ITU just
now. If you really want to have a good belly laugh at the level of
misunderstanding by the ITU of how the internet actually works, just take a
look at this document, which followed ITU Resolution 64:
http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-t/oth/3B/02/T3B020000020002PDFE.pdf
In the mean-time, I am refilling my lolwut meter with a quadruple supply of
"wtf"s, in preparation for the ITU's next move.
There's a more serious aspect to this; the ITU is largely irrelevant to the
Internet, and their actions indicate that they strongly resent this. And
there is nothing more dangerous than a well-funded bureaucracy which
realises that it is now - to all intents and purposes - irrelevant.
Nick
SIIA Chair Simon Tay on Clinton's Asia visit (Bloomberg, 20th Feb 2009):
Steve Engel (Bloomberg): Speaking of provoking, where do you see Hillary
bringing the tact in bringing the issues that Obama wants to raise to the
Chinese in her trip this time. Yuan revaluation is one, and also of course
human rights is top of the agenda. Is she going to be offending her host
here?
Simon Tay: Well, I think, China is the most important relationship that
America has got across the Pacific. It's vital to them, and it's vital to
everyone, and there are a couple of nasty missteps that could be made.
I think the currency issue after the Tim Geithner confirmation statement
would be one of the trickiest things to do. I think the downturn in China
has been understood in America. The Chinese have their own domestic
audience, their own domestic concerns, and if I were Clinton's advisor, I
would tell Clinton, please don't go there too hard and too fast.
I think that the human rights issue is similar. I think the America-China
realtionship needs to go beyond these hotspots, whether it's Tibet, or
currency, and really start off on something more positive. I mean, the
tradition is (that) every (US) President starts off China wrong, and spends
the next six years or so trying to get it right. It would be nice to see
Clinton do something different and get it right from the start.
I can read tea leaves with the best of them, and the tea leaves I see tell me the reporter (in the story the blog points to) doesn't have a clue. What is the substance of the proposal?
The report seemed a reasonably accurate account of what went on in Kampala.
But what is all this about "is the ITU interested in changing BGP"? If the word "metering" makes any sense in context, BGP doesn't meter anything.
The Chinese delegation presented a dozen pages of formulae involving 20+ variables, infinite sums, and other mathematical goodies. Wowing the audience I guess. The whole way through "using BGP" was mentioned - in the sense of pulling data from, and adding data to BGP for the purposes of evaluating these formulae. It was clear that BGP would be used - and modified if need be - to achieve this. Mixing billing with the reachability information signalled through BGP just doesn't seem like a good idea.
Interesting to note was that nowhere was the intent of all this mentioned, which is presumably to calculate the "value" each and every party's traffic traversing a link generates, and to apportion "costs" accordingly.
Misguided, nonsensical, and unworkable ideas often gain traction. It's important that this one doesn't.
Cheers,
Jonny.
From the BBC article quoted in the isoc-ny.org link:
An ITU spokesman said: "The ITU has no plans to modify the BGP protocol, which is not an ITU-T standard.
"A proposal has been made, and is being studied, to use BGP routers to collect traffic flow data, which could be used, by bilateral agreement, by operators for billing purposes."
I can read tea leaves with the best of them, and the tea leaves I see tell me the reporter (in the story the blog points to) doesn't have a clue. What is the substance of the proposal?
The report seemed a reasonably accurate account of what went on in Kampala.
But what is all this about "is the ITU interested in changing BGP"? If the word "metering" makes any sense in context, BGP doesn't meter anything.
The Chinese delegation presented a dozen pages of formulae involving 20+ variables, infinite sums, and other mathematical goodies. Wowing the audience I guess. The whole way through "using BGP" was mentioned - in the sense of pulling data from, and adding data to BGP for the purposes of evaluating these formulae. It was clear that BGP would be used - and modified if need be - to achieve this. Mixing billing with the reachability information signalled through BGP just doesn't seem like a good idea.
Is this 12+ page presentation available anywhere ?
Regards
Marshall
This is done all the time via combinatorial BGP/NetFlow analysis, for peering/transit analysis reports, offnet/on-net billing differentials, etc.
The merits (or lack thereof) of the 'proposal' in question aside, there's nothing evil or stupid about doing this on one's own network.
Lots of 'BGP routers' are used to collect traffic flow data (NetFlow, cflowd, S/flow, NetStream, IPFIX, et. al.) to do this, ever single second of every single day, all around the world - including in China.
It sounds as if the erstwhile proponents of this plan need to catch up to 1997 in terms of their operational clue.
Yes, that was the successful (for us) outcome of the meeting, which would
not have been the case had we not been prepared and had people there.
Just to explain the general danger here... The ITU is the standards body
in which international spectrum allocations and satellite lots are
negotiated. No industrialized country will withdraw from that. Because
it's an international treaty organization, member countries are bound to
enforce the outcome of its decisions within their jurisdictions,
regardless of whether they agreed with the decision or not. If the ITU
had decided to take the BGP spec from the IETF, the IETF could easily have
told them to take a hike, but national governments could not have done so,
and that would put national governments in the very uncomfortable position
of having to try to enact or support that change in law somehow.
With the BGP spec, this all seems a bit ridiculous and abstract, but with
IP allocation, the danger is a little more immediate. The decision on
that will mostly be made in mid-March.
-Bill
Neither the reporter nor the Chinese proponents nor the ITU seem to understand that making use of combined flow telemetry/BGP analytics for traffic engineering, capacity planning, and billing applications has been a common practice for the last 13 or so years.
This seems to pretty much be a non-story, except for the nationalization aspect of it. I concur with Nick's hypothesis that the actual end-goal may be to 'harmonize' trans-national peering agreements/transit fees, and then tax them (probably regressively in terms of transnational traffic) - with a sidecar of surveillance for good measure.
By whom?
The RIRs aren't just going to say, "OK, ITU folks, it's all yours," heh.
> The decision on that will mostly be made in mid-March.
> By whom?
A working group of the ITU Council.
> The RIRs aren't just going to say, "OK, ITU folks, it's all yours," heh.
Indeed not. However, the RIRs don't have a voice in the decision. This
is an intergovernmental decision within the ITU Council. If the ITU
Council were to decide that it's a good idea for the ITU to take over IP
addressing and break it, they would then take it to the ITU
Plenipotentiary. At that point, it could become policy of the treaty
organization, and then member country governments would become bound to
support the policy in their own legal structures. Odds are that would be
expressed in laws similar to that of Korea, where it's illegal for network
operators to get IP addresses from APNIC, their RIR, and they must instead
get them from KRNIC, a Korean governmental agency. Which, in turn,
proxies their votes in the APNIC elections, but that's another story. 
-Bill
My sense is that the ITU has played with such ideas in the past, and the governments have for the most part found it in their interest to not screw with the Internet.
Do you have any specific recommendations on how to keep that true?
Why can't we carry price per "kilosegment" on BGP ?
And don't be so hard on the ITU folks, the only thing they want to
break is the monopoly of IP address allocation.
J
With all due respect, they don't want to break said monopoly, assuming one agrees that it is a monopoly (I think there's a lot more to the story than that, but that's another discussion). They want to *be* said monopoly.