[e2e] It's all my fault

[Vadim Antonov]

On Wed, 16 May 2007, John Wroclawski wrote:

> The people mentioned in this conversation who are proposing 
> user-driven path selection models are, as a general rule, also 
> proposing that the providers benefit when they are selected - ie, 
> some economic or payment mechanism.

I'm not aware of anyone proposing anything remotely feasible economically 
in this space. All I hear is "it is a cool technology and we really really 
really want it".

There's a simple criteria - if you can make a valid business plan out of 
it, there is a fair chance of the model making economic sense.  Otherwise, 
well, think of something better.
 
> The reason a provider might appreciate this is precisely to get 
> *away* from the commodity business that packet delivery (to use your 
> words) is today.

Delivering bits from place A to place B is not something which allows for 
a wide diversity of service offerings.  It either happens within given 
(price,reliability,bandwidth,latency) envelope, or it does not.  So, how 
exactly source routing is going to push on any side of this envelope in 
any significant portion of cases?

This field is littered with corpses of "premium service" pipe dreams.

> The fact that the current Internet design largely decouples many 
> providers from their ultimate customers, economically and 
> technically, is both a strength and a weakness. What it is not is the 
> only possible, or economically astute, answer.

I haven't seen any serious explanation on how exactly SR is going to
benefit people who write the checks for the equipment.

I'm not saying that it couldn't happen in principle - only that it does 
not seem to have any benefits within any non-handwaving scenario.

--vadim