On Apr 20, 2009, at 5:02 AM, Robin Whittle wrote:
Long message ahead:
Discussing Tom's "Liquidity Systems" view of the
Internet's routing and addressing system.
I haven't yet found any insights from it which
help with scalable routing.
Discussion of how with LISP, APT, Ivip or TRRP
more and more address space will be needed by the
"MAB" companies who rent the space out as EID
prefixes micronets or whatever is the name for the
new kind of scalable address space for end-user
networks.
It follows that a greater proportion of space will
be needed by these companies, and a lesser proportion
by ISPs. I give a contrived example of an ISP with a
single /24 being able to serve 10,000 end-user
networks which between them have 100,000 IPv4
addresses of EID / micronet etc. space.
Also, how competition between these MAB companies
will help drive a healthy market for obtaining
space which is less profitably utilised than will
be possible with a good scalable routing solution.
Hi Robin,
Thanks again for the very detailed response; it is flattering whenever
anyone take the time to do something like this, even if the response
is substantially or entirely critical. So, thank you once more.
I can certainly understand how one might arrive at an initial
impression that the "liquidity system" view provides no new insights
for how to structure RRG's efforts, and even how a cursory or partial
reading might leave one with doubts about its overall validity. I will
do my best to challenge those impressions as soon as I get past a
couple of urgent work assignments, hopefully in the next 24-36 hours.
In the mean time, I will simply remark that the theory did not emerge
with RRG in mind, but rather has been developing over the last six
years, initially based on my hands-on experience as a very large
operator working across many different material, commercial, and
regulatory environments, at a level of the industry where largely
unconstrained strategic bargaining plays a substantial role in shaping
some relatively inflexible decision making constraints for the rest of
the industry (and before that as a very well-placed but passive
observer of the topmost levels of the international telecom and
monetary policy-making spheres, and after that as an advisor to
protocol resource coordinating institutions, regulators, and private
investors). The theory is not narrowly conceived in instrumental
terms, along the lines of the RRG charter, but rather is an attempt to
integrate a very broad range of empirical regularities in a
meaningful, illuminating way. Assuming that they continue to hold up
to ongoing scrutiny, recognition of and theoretical engagement with
those regularities *should* usefully inform the kind of work that of
RRG is chartered to undertake, if only by illuminating any
hypothetically interesting development trajectories that have proven
to be consistently productive and/or unproductive under "similar"
conditions in the past. I believe that the theory does satisfy, and
will continue to satisfy that standard -- and perhaps do even more --
but I recognize that the burden will be mine, perhaps indefinitely, to
continuously illustrate and defend those claims.
Of course, even if the theory manages to live up to that challenge
forever, there is no guarantee that it will deliver a specific
solution that can meet all of the looming challenges without
sacrificing any of the features that have made the Internet so
distinctive (and I would add, important) to date. I would like to
think that it could, and might yet, but failing to do that would not
invalidate the theory, or even its potential relevance to RRG. To
quote a favorite movie, we are in a "tight spot"... I'd very much like
to see us get out of that spot without making any irreversible
tradeoffs that we might sorely (but impotently) regret going forward.
So, look for a more substantive response in the next day or two... and
thanks again.
Regards,
TV
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