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July 3, 2003
Peering is the network
I spend a lot of my time evangelizing Internet peering. It is a significant part of the long-term strategy for UEN, especially where we can contribute to the future of the state of Utah.
One of the things I've realized is that peering is often considered to be a fringe issue and skill-set. I've also realized that this completely ignores that the Internet itself exists only because of peering.
In the early days of the Internet, this was much more obvious. Getting connected to the Internet, or the NSFnet or ARPAnet and previous iterations of the Internet, was literally a process of finding someone who was connected already and getting connected to them. It was obvious that the Internet was a network of networks, and the intricacies of that structure often were not transparent to network users (ie email and file transfer via UUCP usually required that users define part of or all of the path from sender to receiver).
As the Internet has gotten larger and the intricacies of network-to-network communication hidden by DNS and other more sophisticated applications, the perception has changed to the "Internet" being a service purchased from a service provider, who magically takes care of getting from here to there. Users are virtually connected, and only occassionally are exposed to the complexities of the networks that make up the Internet (and when those complexities do show up, it's usually in the form of a problem that they only care about until their service provider resolves it).
Peering is one critical poli-soci-techno-feature-function that makes the Internet different from all other networks (open standards is another major one). Unfortunately, while Microsoft's secret plans for replacing TCP/IP with a proprietary protocol are regular topics in I.T. circles and publications, the equally significant political and technical issues related to peering rarely are discussed outside the tiny community of network operators and peering coordinators.
I spend a lot of my time focused on peering. I think there's a huge opportunity for UEN and Utah and the Intermountain West to accelerate our economic development and raise our position in the national and international economies, based on our ability to slightly move peering in our favor. The fact that few others focus on peering now is our opportunity.
But it still makes me wonder why hundreds of millions of people, and thousands of companies, are so willing to let such a critical issue be managed by a relatively small group of people.
Posted by pete at July 3, 2003 7:35 PM