An issue of trust
On April 8th, 2010 some routers at a small ISP, IDC China Telecommunications, started advertising routes through BGP for a good chunk of Internet address space. This was picked up and propagated by their parent, China Telecom, resulting in some 15% of all internet traffic being routed their way for about eighteen minutes.
This sort of thing has happened before and there is no evidence it was anything but a stuff up, but as you can see in this Computerworld story a report to the US congress termed the whole affair “hijacking” internet traffic.
Whether that accusation is true or not the matter highlights two points of interest.
Untrusted networks
The internet is not, nor has ever been, a secure or trusted network. The BGP routing protocol was designed around decentralized routing for good reasons; imagine the problems of routing all internet traffic through one central point. It would be very slow and inefficient for starters. I doubt any internet phone would work except for those fortunate enough to live close to the central routers. If you route in a decentralized way then you’ll have to pass traffic through untrusted points sooner or later. The point being, it’s a little lame to moan about lack on trust on an untrusted network. Given the success of this design to date it is far from certain central control would bring more benefits than problems.
Nationalization of the internet
It also goes to show how sensitive everything is between China and America at the moment. If a small ISP in Tasmania had made the same mistake do you think a congress report would have been generated about traffic hijacking? Just the idea of framing the debate as a hijack makes it sound really bad. Suddenly a BGP routing hiccup on the internet becomes emotively evil. Strong national interests are at work pushing their agendas against the wishes of their citizens now and it seems unavoidable there will be an impact on the current state of affairs.
What I personally don’t want to see is the self righteous force central control of the internet in the name of national security, whilst bleating it’s for my own good. That would be a disaster for performance, for innovation and for freedom.
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