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[ NNSquad ] Re: Peering dispute cuts off Sprint<->Cogent Internet traffic



On Oct 31, 2008, at 1:38 PM, Barry Gold wrote:

OK, so what has happened to the "treats censorship as damage and routes around it" Internet? Even if Embarq and Cogent are no longer talking to each other, the routers should be automatically finding routes via other carriers and sending the packets -- around Robin Hood's barn if necessary, but the Internet is supposed to be _robust_. Jon Postel designed it that way -- I've read the RFCs. That's what ARPA specified when they paid for the development of first the ARPANet and later the Internet -- and what NSF paid for when they branched off NSFNet and allowed commercial traffic.

I don't believe this is the correct interpretation of censorship in this context. As for routing around damage, this is quite possible and there are likely people achieving this today, a node acting as a tunnel broker in a third party's network would do the trick.


Are these guys programming their routers to just drop packets with certain destination IP addresses, instead of finding the shortest available route?

BGP in general models business relationships. At the level Cogent and Sprint are playing at neither has a relationship with a third party that provides them with each others routes. And without peering between Cogent and Sprint their view of the internet simply excludes each other.


I'm beginning to think that Congress (or perhaps an international body similar to the WTO) should make the core RFCs (IP, TCP, BGP, FTP, HTTP, SMTP, and RFC 822) have the force of law. And anybody who violates those protocols should be fined and/or have their connections turned off.

This is layer 8 and above, not found in the RFCs.

Kris