[CCWG-ACCT] What do we mean by "service"?

[Greg Shatan]

Eric,

Thank you.  This is quite helpful in elucidating what we mean when talk
about "services which use the Internet's unique identifiers."

Greg

On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 4:59 PM, Eric Brunner-Williams <
ebw at abenaki.wabanaki.net> wrote:

> Colleagues,
>
> What distinguishes our area of work from all others (that I can think of
> off the top of my head, and some five decades of programming, mostly
> distributed systems), is that the uniqueness of the identifiers (and we can
> ignore protocol parameters, which need not necessarily be "numbers", btw),
> both "names" and "numbers", doesn't take on any particular "uniqueness"
> meaning until the prefix for any particular name-to-address mappings are
> announced and can be referenced from "elsewhere".
>
> So the instances of communication that concern us are those which the
> address (actually its prefix) of some device is "announced" (modernly an
> ASN published via BGP4) and is known, or knowable, to a device at some
> other address (actually some other prefix), similarly "announced".
>
> Where these "announcements" of ASNs and the associated prefixes (via BGP4)
> are both known is in a table in some intermediate device, which knowing
> both ASNs is capable of forwarding packets from one ASN to another, with
> each ASN undertaking the "last hop" or "default" local routing to each of
> the two devices conducting some instance of communication.
>
> We refer to these intermediate ASN-knowing devices as "routers", and those
> which "take a full (routing) table" (a) have a _lot_ of memory (see Note
> infra) and (b) form a system which, because announcements and withdrawals
> of prior announcements occur (mostly) asynchronously, is modernly best
> thought of as forming the "skitter core" (kudus to kc claffy and CAIDA for
> the original research and the circular diagrams (some found on the halls of
> ICANN during its Admiralty Way days)).
>
> Back in the EGP period we could think of an "internet core" as existing in
> some deterministic sense. Modernly, what the global routing table looks
> like depends on where we are looking from, and our notions of "global
> routing tables" are statistical in nature.
>
> Those of you coming from all important names side of the business may be
> slightly discomforted by the notion that names don't matter until they are
> routed, and routed through the Default Free Zone (DFZ), but that's what we
> really mean when we speak about "globally unique identifiers" -- not the
> maximal string spaces that can be formed by 63 bytes, nor all the IPv4 and
> IPv6 addresses, nor all possible parameters the IANA has been tasked to
> publish, but only those addresses who's prefixes are announced to the DFZ,
> and those strings associated with those addresses by some names registry.
>
> So just as Signaling System 7 (defined by the ITU-T's Q.700-series
> recommendations) is what we really mean when we say "telephone", that is, a
> device capable of using the Public Switched Telecommunications Network
> allowing us to dial-in to a CCWG call and communicate with one another,
> resolution of a name across the DFZ by two (or more) devices is what we
> really mean when we, wearing our {ICANN|*NSO|ASO|*AC|DNSOP} policy hats,
> say "service" (smile optional).
>
> This multiply interrupted modest tutorial for some of the people I know
> can be battered into a para, perhaps even a sentence, with clear meaning,
> as an alternative to the existing "service" and the alternate "e.g., email,
> ..." language of the current drafts, and it can be discarded as correct but
> not useful, or incorrect _and_ not useful. It may assist the final word
> smiths.
>
>
> Eric Brunner-Wiliams
> Eugene, Oregon
>
> Note: As of 10/09/15 179,957 ASNs were announced in the ARIN region,
> another 143,717 ASNs were announced in the APNIC region, and another
> 136,435 ASNs were announced in the RIPE region, another 60,747 ASNs were
> announced in the LACNIC region, and another 11,914 ASNs were announced in
> the AfriNIC region.
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