> Even those IXs with MPLA policy have to rely on law and courts for > enforcement -- that is, those with guns.
In the United States, as in most countries, there is an explicit separation of the courts from the enforcement of laws. For instance, in the United States, the Executive Branch is in charge of the guys with guns, while the Judicial branch only deals with making decisions about the application of the laws created by the Legislative branch. The laws are executed and enforced by the Executive branch, hence the name. Laws only need to be enforced when there is a dispute. Laws and regulations, do not necessarily imply that enforcement action is needed. Many people and organizations comply with laws for reasons other than the existence of enforcers. For instance, an organization may feel that it is in the industry's best interests to comply with regulations and therefore it does so in order to set an example for its competitors and to attract customers. Regulations also do not imply the involvement of governments. It is possible for industries to self-regulate such as the ARIN policies which are a product of the ARIN membership, i.e. companies who use IP addresses in their networks. There are also currently attempts to establish self-regulation in the email industry. In the past there was some regulation of Internet peering by the members of an industry organization in the USA called CIX. > I'm afraid your head-in-the-sand approach doesn't appear to be working > well at this time. Major network partition, affecting thousands of > networks and tens (or hundreds) of thousands of actual people, 48 hours > and counting. If the press would truly understand this event then they would be reporting this as a *MAJOR* flaw in the business model of the largest ISPs. The absence of regulation in Internet peering allows this type of situation to come about. It is my opinion that the network and the Internet business would both be stronger if there was some regulation of peering and IP/MPLS network interconnection. This could be done in a couple of ways. One is to have an industry association develop self-regulation in conjunction with major end users of network services. The other would be for regulation to be imposed from without by some kind of interconnect or monitoring business like Equinix or Keynote. The analogy here is the New York Stock Exchange which is a 3rd party which monitors and interconnects the buyers and sellers of shares. In the case of Internet operators I don't foresee the need for an SEC equivalent unless operators cannot agree to disclose their peering agreements and the technical details of their interconnects. A couple of good things can come out of this "open peering" model. One is that disclosure of the technical details, including packet drop, buffer consumption, and bandwidth, would lead to more reliable interconnects and the ability to provide quality of service SLAs across provider networks. The other possible benefit is to develop more sophisticated interconnect variants such as MPLS VPN interconnects and CDN or multicast interconnects. --Michael Dillon
