[e2e] It's all my fault

[Vadim Antonov]

On Tue, 15 May 2007, Ken Calvert wrote:

> Allowing source routing at the level of transit providers 
> shifts the balance of power back toward the user. (See 
> Xiaowei Yang's thesis.)

Are we living on the same planet?  Do you seriously think that any ISP
would be interested in purchasing equipment or software which would let
users to get the best of the "balance of power" (or, to put it more
bluntly, ability to screw ISP's traffic engineering and business 
arrangements with peers)?

The reality is that ISPs are here to make money. Anything which doesn't 
look like it's good to their bottom lines is not going to be deployed.

> It's really about the interesting possibilities that cannot even be
> contemplated because of the lack of such a mechanism (and others needed
> to make it feasible).

Oh, surely one does not need actual deployment to contemplate all the 
interesting possibilities.  There's a lot of wonderful ideas floating 
around. A tiny percentage of them may even make business sense.

One reason why I left networking is because packet delivery is ultimately
boring. There's a good enough technology which more-less works. Years ago
I figured out how to build backbones with arbitrarily large capacity,
there are no more technological challenges in that.  This market is all
about price/performance now, a commodity market.

--vadim