[governance] The LAN Party in the Lower-48, De-Peering and Virtualization

[Jim Fleming]

People in so-called Internet governance seem to be stuck on the same old
root-zone,
root-server, name-space debates. A few academics seem to make a career of it
and fund
their global travels edcating the world.

Meanwhile, the Lower-48 is expanding their LAN Party and asking why they
want to
allocate any band-width to islands that do not pay for the connections. The
LAN Party
customers are more and more paying for the transports. Paying customers come
first
in the Lower-48. People outside the Lower-48 may not agree with that or
understand
it. Their .NET connection is not a given. If they do not pay for connections
to the Lower-48
and into all of the Super States in the Lower-48, they will find out that
they are either
de-Peered, or moved to Virtualization.

Virtualization moves the people outside the Lower-48 to a .NET experience
that contains
the sub-set of the .NET that their band-width can support. If their
government pays for and
controls the band-width to the Lower-48, the government may make that
sub-set very
small. Someone visiting the Lower-48 may see services that they can never
get in their
remote island nation. They not only do not have enough money to buy a
connection, it may
be too far from the Lower-48 to ever be able to support certain services
because the laws
of physics are not going to change, because some government body votes to
change those laws.

What some islands are of course doing is creating their own LAN Party, and
are also working
harder on caching technology that not only allows them to participate but
improves the
performance of systems in the Lower-48. That is a win-win situation.

What does not work is to have academics running around claiming the .NET
will scale seemlessly
to all corners of the world, at no cost, or a cost divided equally between
all humans on the .NET.
That is not going to happen. The laws of physics prevent it, when faced with
LAN Party band-width
needs and people have seen how the academic/government calculator works when
the divide
key is pressed. They pay little or nothing, the people pay most of the fees,
and receive the short
end of the services. In an ideal world, each member of the LAN Party pays an
equal share.
WIMAX may help to make that more possible in 10-mile radius areas. That does
not imply that can scale smoothly to cover the Lower-48. Too many hops kills
any useful real-time service with lag.
Again, governance people can pass a law declaring the laws of physics do not
apply, but they still
do.

The laws of economics also apply and people now are more educated about who
is paying for
what and who derives a benefit. One of the problems with democracy and/or
free economies is
that given a vote, it may be possible that a large group in the Lower-48
decide that they see no
benfit in continuing to waste bandwidth or gear exchanging packets with some
parts of the world.
If there are a small number of people in an area that need to reach a remote
place, they may soon
find they have to pay for that facility, if it is even available. The LAN
Party may be consuming
all of the marketing and technical resources. That is one of the down-sides
of a free market.

It is ironic that people in communist regimes may find that they have a
"better" (better in their eyes)
.NET experience, because they have imported the
communist/academic/government model of
the legacy Internet controlled by THE Big Lie Society. They may find that
they do not have to
pay anything to access their .NET, and their censored-root. It may be the
same censored-root
that THE Big Lie Society markets around the world.

What people do not seem to understand is that by and large, people at the
LAN Party, quite
frankly do not care about the censored-root. Many of them do not even see or
need domain
names. They enter their name in their clan, join the LAN Party, and away
they go. Their .NET
experience matches what they want and they pay for it. They are not
interested in reading millions
of dear-diary blogs about people reporting that they connected at airport A
and flew to airport
B and also connected....BFD

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