[RSSAC Caucus] On "Government wanting to Improve General Internet Connectivity/Access" (Local Perspective Tool Party)

[Mukund Sivaraman]

I want to add the following on "Government wanting to Improve General
Internet Connectivity/Access" that was discussed in the "RSSAC: User
Narratives for the Local Perspective Tool Work Party". Apologies if this
is the wrong list (please point me to the right one if there is a
different one for it).

Though the currently described measurements appear weak, this topic
itself is a real concern. In June 2018 I got a phone call from a person
at meity.gov.in where they expressed that they were concerned about the
number of root zone queries that were exiting India.

In those days, routing was crappy too. I am in Chennai and there is an F
instance in Chennai run by Cloudflare, and there was an ISC F instance
in Chennai before that too. But my route to it went through Mumbai which
is a far away city. It's like touching your nose circling your head.

There are two aspects here:

* The latency and performance of access (where a geographically distant
  root instance may have a smaller RTT and fewer hops) which may matter
  to end users as user experience

* The concern from government about resolutions being dependent on
  infrastructure outside the country, which may matter to governments
  for reasons other than user experience

We may not need to make measurements via resolvers for this. We may be
able to assume that anyone may want to run a resolver, and measure RTT,
hopcount?, manually look at NSIDs and any other metrics that anycast
service operators use to check if users reach the closest/fastest pop to
them. We can also figure out if users reach root instances in their own
country or not (as much as this can be determined, perhaps by following
the route).

		Mukund
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