[ih] NO "settlements" as part of Internet History

[the keyboard of geoff goodfellow]

guy, yours truly would Dearly Love for you (and/or anyone else, Pretty
Please!) to chime in and say more here vis-a-vis the history of this
subject matter and more BEYOND the 1991 era!

a clarification and expansion vis-a-vis

"The term "settlements" was indeed used, though I don't recall
anyone suggesting anything like the X.25/X.75 model of per-"call"
money changing hands."


yours truly used the word "calls" specifically because, like as/in the
voice landline Public Switched Telephone Networks (PSTN), the X.25/X.75
networks use(d) Virtual Circuits for End-To-End connections and thusly
charged users accordingly:

in the voice based PSTN the fee/charge/tariff was for the length of time a
call: from the receipt by the callers switch of Answer Supervision on the
receiving end Switch until call termination.

On the X.25/X.75 data networks not only were you charged a fee for the
length of time the Virtual Circuit was established/up/connected, but were
also docked an additional fee -- per some unit (IIRC, KB) -- for/of data
sent/received over the Virtual Circuit "call".

luckly, in the Internet "model" we have/had a Sender Keeps All (the
revenue) Model with NO inter carrier/inter networking Settlements for our
data connections/transmissions (nee "calls" :D)

geoff

On Sun, Sep 13, 2020 at 2:05 PM *Guy Almes <galmes at tamu.edu
<galmes at tamu.edu>> wrote:*

> Geoff, Brian, Vint, et al.,
>    Ah, settlements, ANS, the CIX, the NSF AUP, circa 1991.
>    As Brian notes, I was a minor player since, in early 1991, I
> transitioned from the university world (where I'd run an NSFnet-related
> regional network in Texas) to working at ANS (the "joint venture" that
> John Markoff refers to in the NYT article below.
>
>    As with the more interesting (to me) topic of transition from EGP to
> BGP, I'll try to emphasize the historical part and not attempt to be
> saying anything that might be part of a currently controversial topic.
>
>    One preface: this was certainly an era of "exponential growth", both
> traffic and the number of sites connected and other measures were
> doubling every few months.
>    And one property of a system experiencing rapid exponential growth is
> that, along with rapid quantitative changes come what seem like
> substantial qualitative changes.
>    And this makes communication and cooperation and other things, in a
> word, hard.
>
>    Anyway, one thing that I perceived in 1991 was the value of what was
> sometimes called the "NSFnet model" during the late 1980s -- with
> campuses connected to (usually) disjoint state/regional networks and
> with these all connected to a single very fast backbone.  Between summer
> 1988 and the 1991 period of the Markwood article the advantages of that
> model were quite evident.  For example, the NSFnet backbone was using T1
> circuits in 1988 while most of the connections to campuses used 56kb/s
> leased lines.
>    The factor of 24 increase in backbone capacity was key to the rapid
> exponential growth of the late 1980s.  And, by the way, it fueled
> innovation by raising the bar on scalable applications with growing
> end-to-end performance.
>    As the regionals began to make greater use of T1 circuits, the need
> for the NSFnet backbone to grow to T3 was evident, but the thinking (and
> here I am repeating what I recall being said at the time -- I was not
> part of this planning) was that NSF could not pay for 100% of the cost
> of the needed T3 circuits, but they could pay a large part of that.  And
> this would especially work if some other source (e.g., non-agency and
> perhaps non-research/education-community) could pay for the balance.
>    Similarly, ANS was formed, in part, to organize how the backbone
> could move from T1 circuits to T3 circuits.  The idea was that this
> would preserve the scalability and rapid increase in backbone capacity
> and thus spur growth and application innovation.  The new commercial
> networks could then connect to and benefit from this super-fast backbone
> and also benefit.
>    For several different reasons, some of the pioneering commercial ISPs
> did not see things that way.  They were happy to build their own
> T1-based national networks and thus be "peer" national networks with the
> NSFnet/ANS backbone rather than build a set of regional commercial
> networks that would make use of the new T3 backbone.
>
>    At the time, this seemed to me (I won't speak for my ANS colleagues
> or any others) as unfortunate and maybe irrational.  Unfortunate in that
> these new commercial networks would paying more for their multiple
> T1-based infrastructure and not be "contributing" in modest ways to the
> economies of scale of a shared super-fast (T3) backbone.
>
>    The pioneer commercial networks, especially PSI and UUnet/Alternet,
> wanted to interconnect with "zero settlements" (i.e., paying nothing
> toward the costs of the T3 backbone).  This seemed unfair to us at ANS.
>    And ANS wanted to establish a workable way for commercial traffic to
> contribute toward the shared 'backbone'.  This seemed unfair to the
> pioneer commercial ISPs.
>
>    The term "settlements" was indeed used, though I don't recall anyone
> suggesting anything like the X.25/X.75 model of per-"call" money
> changing hands.
>
>    This is all 30 years ago and so much has changed.
>    Trying to be fair to all, I think it comes down to ANS believing in
> the value of a shared "backbone" layer, even with competition for
> commercial customers, and with figuring out how to amicably figure out
> how to arrange for the costs of the "backbone" to be shared between the
> research/education world and the commercial world.  It should have been
> a "win-win" but was a show-stopper.
>    And the pioneer commercial networks believed in multiple independent
> national networks, peering with "zero settlements" at exchange points.
>
>    In many respects, the pros and cons of backbone/hierarchy models and
> exchange point models remain to this day.  I won't say more here, mainly
> to keep focused on the history of the 1991 era.
>
>    In hindsight, I think there were several hard lessons that we were
> all learning.
> <> While the advantages of the backbone/hierarchy model remain, it was
> natural to overemphasize those advantages in 1991.  Over the multiple
> decades since the 1984ish deregulation of long distance (inter-LATA)
> telecommunication services, the relative cost of the "long distance"
> part of end-to-end communication costs has decreased.
> <> The non-technical difficulties with asking the pioneer commercial
> networks to accept a notion of being upstream or downstream from a
> backbone provider, even apart from any technical or economic or
> operational issues, was great than I expected.
> <> While the Internet of circa 1990 was mostly based on universities and
> research labs and the new commercial players (both providers and
> customers) wanted access to it, things were changing rapidly.  By 1995,
> with the recompetition for NSF funding for university-based regionals,
> the university world realized (if no before) than they were no longer
> the center of the Internet, but that they were, in a word, customers.
>
>    So there was probably a mix of (a) companies striving for economic/
> competitive advantage and (b) companies trying to navigate a set of
> paradigm shifts that few understood clearly.
>
>    One closing comment; I vividly recall reading the John Markwood NYT
> article below when it was new.  One quote that makes me grimace / smile
> even now is Bill Shrader's [["It's like taking a Federal park and giving
> it to K Mart," Mr. Schrader said.]]  Given the origins of PSI with the
> NSFnet-based regional in New York state, this struck me as extreme
> chutzpah.  I recall wondering why it was bad with a Federal park, but
> not with a state park.
>    But that was, as I say, 30 years ago.  At the time, it was not a
> pretty picture, but time heals all wounds?
>
>    Cheers,
>         -- Guy
>
> On 9/10/20 8:21 PM, the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via
> Internet-history wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 10, 2020 at 10:42 AM *Jack Haverty via Internet-history
> > <internet-history at elists.isoc.org <internet-history at elists.isoc.org>>
> wrote*
> > :
> >
> >> CCITT was working on X.25, and creating X.75, to interconnect their
> >> networks.  It was a natural evolution of the PTT's prior interconnection
> >> of their telephone networks.   Later, as DDN marched down the X.25 path,
> >> the subsequent government Internet might have ended up based on
> >> X.25/X.75.   If it worked.
> >>
> >
> > part and parcel of the X.25 and X.75 networking shibboleth was the notion
> > of "settlements" -- just like with the PTT's interconnection of their
> > telephone networks -- where The Fee for/of Transit was split along a
> > "calls" participants/networks transited.
> >
> > IIRC, Advanced Network and Services (ANS) tried to "imprint" the
> > settlements model on the fledgling Internet -- with them In The Middle
> > collecting a fee for transit (for commercial traffic) between networks as
> > well as for interconnection with The Budding commercial Internet upstarts
> > (PSI, ALTERNET, etc.) the resulting in the founding of the CIX, viz.:
> >
> >
> > *Data Network Raises Monopoly Fear*
> > By JOHN MARKOFF
> > The New York Times
> > December 19, 1991
> >
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://www.nytimes.com/1991__;!!KwNVnqRv!RmH212ZDH6MdnCAAMUUO7OLJexwNzF_HWvEP5LJV-CL_IWJh4Qof2_qA5z-Yqw$
> > /12/19/business/data-network-raises-monopoly-fear.html
> >
> > Soon after President Bush signed legislation calling for the creation of
> a
> > nationwide computer data "superhighway," a debate has erupted over
> whether
> > the Government gave an unfair advantage to a joint venture of I.B.M. MCI
> > that built and manages a key part of the network.
> >
> > The venture, known as Advanced Network and Services, manages a network
> > called NSFnet, which connects hundreds of research centers and
> > universities. NSFnet also manages links to dozens of other countries. All
> > these networks are collectively known as Internet.
> >
> > Some private competitors say Advanced Network and Services uses its
> favored
> > position to squeeze them out of the data-transmission market by
> > establishing rules that make it difficult to connect to NSFnet.
> >
> > *Traffic Has Doubled*
> >
> > NSFnet was founded by the National Science Foundation, a Federal agency,
> > and is composed of leased telephone lines that link special computers
> > called routers, which transmit packages of data to three million users in
> > 33 countries. Data traffic over the NSFnet backbone has doubled in the
> last
> > year.
> >
> > The Government wants to develop a national data highway for electronic
> > commerce, digital video transmissions to homes and vast electronic
> > libraries that could be drawn on by the nation's schools.
> >
> > Advanced Network and Services, based in Elmsford, N.Y., was set up last
> > year as a nonprofit corporation with $10 million from the International
> > Business Machines Corporation and the MCI Communications Corporation.
> > Earlier this year it set up a for-profit subsidiary, called ANS CO+RE
> > (pronounced core), to sell computer network services. That led some
> > competitors to complain that Advanced Network and Services would be able
> to
> > compete unfairly because of its arrangement with the Government.
> >
> > *Fear Loss of Innovation*
> >
> > People involved in planning for a national data network say it is
> essential
> > to provide for fair competition, which will lead rival companies to offer
> > creative and entrepreneurial services in the hope of building market
> share.
> > Without competiton, they say, the Government will have created a monopoly
> > that has little incentive to innovate.
> >
> > "This is the first major communication business to be born under the
> > deregulation era," said David Farber, a computer scientist at the
> > University of Pennsylvania and a pioneer in data networking. "This hasn't
> > happened since the growth of the telephone industry. You want it to be a
> > business that doesn't repeat the errors of the past."
> >
> > In recent years, the National Science Foundation has tried to shift its
> > operations and ownership of NSFnet to Advanced Network and Services. And
> it
> > will try to establish competition through contracts for networks to
> compete
> > with NSFnet next year.
> >
> > But there is no level playing field, complained William L. Schrader,
> > president of Performance Systems International Inc., a Reston, Va.,
> company
> > that provides commercial data connections to Internet. He made public two
> > letters between officials of Advanced Network and Services and the
> National
> > Science Foundation that he said gave the company unfair control over
> access
> > to the network. The result, he added, was that the Government turned over
> > valuable public property to a private company.
> >
> > "It's like taking a Federal park and giving it to K Mart," Mr. Schrader
> > said. "It's not right, and it isn't going to stand."
> >
> > Performance Systems and several other companies have set up an
> alternative
> > to NSFnet, known as a CIX. Mr. Schrader said his company and the venture
> of
> > I.B.M. and MCI were competing for the same customers but unlike his rival
> > he lacked a Federal subsidy. He said he might ask the Internal Revenue
> > Service to look at the business relationship between Advanced Network's
> > nonprofit and for-profit operations.
> >
> > *'Very Competitive Environment'*
> >
> > Allan Weis, the president of Advanced Network, disputed that his company
> > had an unfair advantage. "It's a very competitive environment right now,"
> > he said.
> >
> > At the National Science Foundation, Stephen Wolff, director of its
> > networking division, said I.B.M. and MCI had overbuilt the network and
> were
> > selling commercial service based on the excess capacity that was
> available.
> >
> > A number of organizations are working informally to settle the dispute.
> >
> > "I think it's a mess," said Mitchell D. Kapor, the founder of the Lotus
> > Development Corporation and now head of the Electronic Frontier
> Foundation,
> > a public-interest group focusing on public policy issues surrounding data
> > networks. "Nobody should have an unfair advantage."
> >
> >
>
>

-- 
Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
living as The Truth is True