[ppml] Free Market

[Paul Vixie]

(warning-- it's the weekend and drc and i appear to be behaving sillily.)

> My understanding is that the limitation is actually routing table flux, not
> size.

it's a little of both.  you can tolerate a lot more flux in a small table
than in a large one.  and a large one is likely to have a lot more than a
small one.  so large is a generally good indicator of badness in routing
tables, even though a large one that had no flux would be easy to handle,
since a large one without flux is almost a contradiction in terms.

> ... and we're told we can handle "2M routes today, 10M with no  
> change in technology" (if you believe your friendly router vendor).

noone believes router vendors who say that, and since even if it were somehow
unaccountably true it would require that everybody buy new routers during a
credit crunch in a thin-margin business, and we limit participation in "the
core" to the "subset of 'everybody'" who can afford such things in this
decade, the table would not grow after all and so nobody would actually need
the new routers.  so i think we can stop bringing up this possibility.

> > so, provider-assigned (PA) has a provably bad short term economic model
> > (it functions as a price lock due to its renumbering penalty), whereas
> > provider- independent (PI) has a provably bad long term economic model (it
> > blows out the routing table).
> 
> PI has a _presumed_ bad long term economic model if you assume there are no
> additional constraints on the flux in the routing system.  As you are aware,
> in the past some ISPs have imposed additional constraints to protect their
> customers routability within their networks (namely prefix length filters
> and flap dampening).  These measures had both positive and negative impacts
> but it isn't like "OMG End of The Internet WE'RE DOOMED" is a foregone
> conclusion.

those constraints will modify the meaning of PI sufficiently that we'd be
discussing it as a third possibility.  universal PA won't work, universal PI
won't work, a hybrid of PA+PI has gotten us this far, we don't think it'll
get us to a future we'll like, and nobody has a specific proposal or vision
for what future we might like or how to get there.  sounds doomish to me.

> With oil, or rather carbon dioxide (and perhaps less controversially, with
> sulphur dioxide) emissions, governments have implemented 'tradable emission
> allowances', a reasonable short summary of one done in the US is at
> http://www.house.gov/jec/cost-gov/regs/cost/emission.htm.

i also like <http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/963.html>.  (i
assume you meant the above as a joke, so i'm sharing one i find funnier.)

> One could imagine an environment where routing slots are managed the same
> was as SO2 emissions, perhaps with a periodic review of the maximum
> allowable number of slots to track improvements in technology.

one could imagine, as edmond rostand did in cyrano de bergerac, flying to the
moon by six novel methods.  i'd prefer blueprints to imaginings, however.

> Of course, to imagine this, you also have to imagine either government
> (which?)  intervention or a level of cooperation in self-regulation amongst
> ISPs that stretches credulity.  Sort of like getting global agreement on
> addressing climate change.  Oh well.

DE GUICHE (turning round):
   Six?
CYRANO (volubly):
   First, with body naked as your hand,
   Festooned about with crystal flacons, full
   O' th' tears the early morning dew distils;
   My body to the sun's fierce rays exposed
   To let it suck me up, as 't sucks the dew!
DE GUICHE (surprised, making one step toward Cyrano):
   Ah! that makes one!

(http://encyclopediaindex.com/b/cdben10.htm)