Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!dfk From: dfk@NIC.EU.net (Daniel Karrenberg) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains Subject: Re: problems with nsfnet-relay.ac.uk Message-ID: <2654@mcsun.eu.net> Date: 5 Mar 91 16:06:34 GMT References: <1991Feb22.181958.14608@ns.uoregon.edu> <75539@bu.edu.bu.edu> <1991Feb26.092928.954@ecrc.de> <1991Mar3.070813.29410@riacs.edu> Organization: EurOpen Lines: 62 medin@cincsac.arc.nasa.gov (Milo S. Medin) writes: > .... One >problem is that much of Europe still talks to itself via the US. Thus adding >a European root doesn't help much. This may not be the right newsgroup but Milo brought it up here, so i'll continue it here. I have no intention to flame or critisise Milo, just to light another angle of the story. There are indeed some Europe-Europe paths still going via the US but I object to the "much of Europe" phrasing. To my knowlege this is not happening on a major scale. The EUropean Internet community (RIPE) is doing its best to eradicate these paths! At the last RIPE meeting we have passed a very strong recommendation to get the problem solved quickly. There were quite a few people who advocated drastic measures like filtering traffic on transatlantic links. We apreciate the help we get form the US Internet community while we solve this problem and we are working on solving it. > ... But the links to Europe come into the U.S. all over the place, >and thus European access is problematic. There are efforts underway to re-engineer this and some steps have already been taken like the consolidating management of the US end of lines to France and Scandinavia. >I know many people would rather believe that problems are political in nature >and not technical (and some certainly are, much to all our grief!), In this case the European end of the problem is political and not at all technical. We have no centrally funded and managed backbone networks which cover all of Europe. Everything we do here has to be done by cooperation rather than by central management and central responsibility. Imagine that all regional networks in the US just had bilateral connections with different usage policies on each of them! That would be *hard* to FIX (pun intended). The fact that "Internet Protocol Suite" was a dirty word here until very recently -and still is in some parts, especially those with money- doesn't help us either. >most >people in the Internet community really try and do the right thing, and >re-engineering the root nameserver system is one of many things we are >trying to do to improve life in the worldwide Internet. (Re)-engineering the European Internet as a whole works just like that. The Internat community (coordinated by RIPE) is very pragamatic and tries very hard to keep a reasonable infrastructure going. We have to live with our political and funding constraints however. Cheers Daniel (Deputy Chairman of RIPE) -- Daniel Karrenberg Future Net: CWI, Amsterdam Oldie Net: mcsun!dfk The Netherlands Because It's There Net: DFK@MCVAX