Re: [tlug] What would happen to the Internet if the US fell off the map

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Josh Glover writes:

 > Here is what I meant: if you have worked for a major ISP or have
 > some kind of special insight, you really should say so. Otherwise,
 > we have to treat your opinion as equivalent to anyone else's; just
 > a semi-informed guess.

That's up to him, though.  In particular, some people's brains shut
down when they find out you're an expert.  Some of those people will
accept whatever you say uncritically, others will oppose it equally
uncritically, just because you're an expert.

 > professionally. When Keith or Mauro or I talk about an Amazon issue,
 > we should state our affiliation.

That's a different matter, because of the possibility of
astro-turfing.

To the technology:

 > 2. New pipes can be laid extremely quickly when necessary.

But not across oceans AFAIK, even today.

 > > Even the throtteling of TCP wont help here because the source of
 > > the traffic isn't one point, but millions of uncoordinated hosts.
 > > Even if each of them sends only one packet, all of them together
 > > will make up a huge amount of data.

The quantities are plausible, but I don't find the implied topology
so.  As you point out, for commercial reasons routing is mostly
manual.  Why?  Because commercial entities want to choose their
partners.  This implies (AFAICS) a hierarchical network, and thus
chokepoints where throttling will be effective.  So Josh's argument
has a chance to be effective:

 > I agree with all of this. But why do you assume that the ISPs are
 > sitting on their hands? No halfway decent network admin will rely on
 > the clients' TCP stacks playing nice; they'll start changing routing
 > policies and choking way back on the throttles so their queues don't
 > overflow.