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

[Drazek, Keith]

+1 very informative.

Sent from my iPhone

On Nov 13, 2015, at 8:24 PM, Greg Shatan <gregshatanipc at gmail.com<mailto:gregshatanipc at gmail.com>> wrote:

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<mailto: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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