[Chapter-delegates] Our German colleagues on "national Internets"

[Hans Peter Dittler]

Hello everybody,

sorry for not answering immediately - but I am in transit to the Vancouver IETF.
This text was translated using google translate or similar when somebody posted it to the chapters list - so not all the nuances and all of the sarcasm might come through from the German original.

> Isn't Hans Peter arguing that using legislation to filter traffic is 
> the bad idea. 
Exactly - Routing defined by local by law is currently part of our German local government's discussion.
I tried to speak for the traditional, well established routing by technologically defined routes, ignoring borders and countries if they do not make sense in network topology.
And my position is especially against companies being ordered by governments to choose specific routing (or any other specific technology by the way).
Networks should in most cases follow technology and perhaps money (look for the cheapest and fastest route).
Selling to people that their data is safe because it is kept inside some borders is wrong 
- If it is said by governments you can be sure that these governments look into your data more intensely as ever before
- and if companies try to sell local routing for data protection please look very carefully if this is not only hot air to help them to increase revenue by charging for local routing extra or gain better reputation as traditionally it is in the best interest of any ISP to route locally if ever possible to avoid upstream charges.

>I don't read him as saying networks should not make their own routing decisions?
> Maybe Hans Peter can explain further himself?
I am absolutely sure never have said this - the routing policy decisions must be taken by the companies and ISPs and should never come from government or other still to be defined governmental bodies.

> At the moment most routing decisions are pretty opaque. I heard some 
> complaints that UK broadband networks are playing silly games with 
> each other.  We saw similar in the US over recent years.
What could be better is the transparency.
It is very hard for any customer or user to understand how packets are flowing in the network.
And to be honest - even for insiders it is not always understandable what routing really does.
Especially when lines break routing sometimes finds surprising paths to run around a broken link.
 
Sorry if some remarks from my posting were misleading or got squeezed in the translation, but this text was targeted to a very limited audience of an internal German mailing list.

I will try to answer any questions, please feel free to ask on this list or mail to me directly


Hans Peter Dittler
Member of the board
ISOC.DE
Internet Society German Chapter e.V.