Subject: Re: [p2pi] why i hummed no

From: Bob Briscoe <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:41:42 +0100

Folks,

I'm going to split my reasons for humming no into procedural and technical.

Procedural
----------
The BoF's problem description scared me.
1) Vagueness was introduced to avoid deciding what the problem was.
2) I wasn't happy to leave an ALTO w-g to finesse such a vague 
problem statement. Particularly given I judged that the large 
majority of those who would work on the problem didn't seem to be 
listening to advice on why their model of the world was partial.

Doing localisation would be easy to standardise, but I believe it 
SHOULD NOT be the goal. Doing the proper thing: policy-controlled 
path-selection advice ('conditional localisation') is still a 
research problem, IMHO. It's likely solutions like we already have 
from P4P are better, but the claims of 'better' so far given on this 
list use inappropriate metrics to judge 'better' (see next mail). Not 
knowing what 'better' means smells like a research problem to me.

* At the p2pi workshop in Boston, at least some people were saying 
that localisation wasn't the goal (eg. the P4P guys) - their 
solutions allowed ISPs to judge that paths to remote peers could be 
better than local.

* However, /everyone/ presenting in the ALTO BoF didn't seem to have 
even considered that localisation might not be a sensible goal.

My thinking: even if the w-g decides that localisation is NOT a goal, 
what hope do we have that all those people who started out not 
understanding this, will be capable of dealing with a much more 
researchy problem: an optimisation that is NOT trying to localise per se.

Technical
---------
Next mail I'll give more reasons than have so far been given on this 
list for why unconditional localisation SHOULD NOT be a goal - from 
both ISP and user perspectives.

Bob

____________________________________________________________________________
Bob Briscoe, <[email-masked]>      Networks Research Centre, BT Research
B54/77 Adastral Park,Martlesham Heath,Ipswich,IP5 3RE,UK.    +44 1473 645196  

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