Evaluating Technological, Operational, and Architectural Drivers of Growth as Players Consolidate & Bandwidth is Set to Explode

These Annual Reports provide, as a reference work, an indexed Handbook to assist those who are trying to evaluate the complex and fast changing phenomenon known as the Internet. For existing subscribers it has become a means of organizing material from past newsletters for reference and review. For many others it serves as a worthwhile introduction to the COOK Report.

Our new Handbook: "Building Internet Infrastructure" contains the full text of Internet infrastructure related articles from the March 1997 COOK Report through the February 1998 issue. It is divided into six sections covering the following six critical issues:

• Critical technology changes of 1997

• Efforts to develop new business models based on various approaches to Quality of Service

• Peering and transit

• Routers and routing tables

• Provider business models and case studies

• Internet governance or management - an unresolved crisis

The reorganization of the articles into the above six topical threads that unfold over time, and the addition of a detailed five page index makes it easier to track otherwise complex developments. At 312 pages, Building Internet Infrastructure is a third longer than the Evolving anthology which we published a year ago.

The rest of this message contains:

1. Reflections from Washington and Tokyo -- a summary of our understanding of the current state and future potential direction of the Internet.

2. The complete Table of Contents of the full report.

3. Description of the Handbook's Audience

4. Pricing and Ordering Information

REFLECTIONS FROM WASHINGTON IETF AND TOKYO

This is the third in an annual series of infrastructure reports from the COOK Report. We begin with a summary of our understanding of the current state of the Internet.

In 1997 we saw growth continued, fights over peering, a predicted fiber shortage that failed to materialize and consolidation taking place not at the bottom but rather at the top of the market. While prices for bandwidth from the major providers edged upward, the industry escaped serious price increases as Qwest and others labored mightily to bring new fiber on line. With Verio buying up providers and WorldCom going on an acquisitions binge, consolidation took place but not in the bottom half of the market.

In this context in June AT&T researcher David Isenberg, published his web essay "Rise of the Stupid Network." Isenberg articulated with great clarity and force with respect to the telephone network and the Internet, what George Gilder has been saying more obscurely for several years with respect to telecommunications in general. The message: the Internet is a stupid network with big fast pipes connecting intelligent devices on user's desktops at the periphery. New companies such as Qwest, applying new Internet technologies and new technologies such as wave division multiplexing, are set to create networks offering unprecedented amounts of bandwidth. In contrast the telephone companies' networks are intelligent networks designed to ration scarce bandwidth connecting dumb telephones across a smart network. In this showdown, Isenberg suggests that the victor will be Òthe Internet, which, because it makes the details of network operation irrelevant, is shifting control to the end user.Ó But the phone companies, which are still many times larger than the rapidly growing Internet, are beginning to realize that the Internet has the potential make their entire infrastructure obsolete.

A critical question is the degree to which the phone companies will embrace or fight the Internet juggernaught that is bearing down on them. With the on going wave of telco mergers and a rise of by pass technologies opening possibilities outside the telco's networks, this question is likely to have a major impact on the Internet business environment in 1998. We will return to these issues at the end of this introduction.

Peering

In 1995, as the Internet's commercial buildout in the US got underway, the network engineers were in charge. In a spirit of let's make things work as widely and as quickly as possible, almost every ISP that connected at the public exchange points peered with almost every one else. While there were some technical snafus, they seemed bearable to the engineers. However, as the largest national service providers all went public, the territory of the engineers was invaded by the bean counters - those with the instructions to do what ever was necessay to return a healthy profit.

During the second half of 1996 many of these folk refused to open new peering sessions with those new comers that did not match their size and traffic load. In the mean time, about 25 additional national backbones had been pieced together and the largest five NSPs were each peered with about 50 other networks. This era of open connections cut more than five million dollars a year off the cost of what it took to be a national player by making it possible for those who connected to three or more exchange points at speeds of 45 megabits per second to build a national backbone without having to pay the costs of directly connecting to upstream providers.

Early in 1997 we heard a rumor that turned out to be true. UUNET was telling its peers that it would not renew their peering agreements and that they would have to sign non disclosure agreements to find out how much it would cost to remain connected. We brought the story public in early May as both UUNET and Sprint announced an end to free peering.

However, by the end of the year relatively few had been depeered. In many cases UUNET backed off, we were told, because of the bad publicity. Nevertheless, six months later, John Curran was saying that when up grades to OC-12 are completed by the five major backbones in late 1998, he expected the number of fully peered National Service Providers to shrink from present levels of 35 or so to about ten or less.

For some time the threat of a peering crunch has been worse than the actual reality. Still the signs are that the rules are going to change and about two dozen NSPs will have to make serious changes to thier business models if they are to survive. Some will be bought as Genuity was by GTE Internetworking (BBN) in December. Others will be acquired and disappear as NetRail did in November.

However, another possibility has recently emerged for these players. This is the GigaPOP model pioneered by Savvis. Savvis runs what it calls "private NAPs" in Chicago, New York, St Louis, Atlanta, Dallas, Los Angeles and Santa Clara. Each of these cities are connected by a DS-3 ATM Network which serve to channel connections from ten other cities into the seven private NAP or gigapop cities. In each of these cities Savvis connects via a DS 3 to MCI , Sprint and UUNET.

This does several interesting things. First it allows Savvis to be a customer of three of the five largest backbones. Savvis doesn't even bother to think about peering with MCI Sprint or UUNET. If it did, it would have to do so at the horribly congested public exchanges and would still need to figure out how to get its traffic to those with whom it did not peer. Avoiding the public exchanges allows Savvis to give its downstream customers better performance than those customers could expect were Savvis to be peered with the big five at the public exchanges.

It also allows Savvis to play the role of a regional aggregator of traffic including multihoming local ISPs to three of the five major nationals. It does this more cost effectively than each could do on its own. In effect Savvis is running seven regional 'airports' for local ISPs. In doing so it provides a realtively low cost and highly efficient way of transfering their traffic to the national and international "flights" (routes) of the Internet.

We believe it to be very likely for those backbones that are threatened during the coming year by the loss of peering to be able to hunker down to profitable roles as regional aggregators of ISP traffic for the smaller number of tier one backbones. We would hope that this regional GigaPOP or private NAP model will create a counterweight to the power of the national backbones by aggregating a segment of the ISP market in a way that it would be more immune to increased costs of connection than it would be if ISP had to negotiate for individual Sprint, MCI and UUNET connections.

Quality of Service

With the costs of building out major global backbones in the OC3 to OC12 range fall reportedly in the range of hundreds of millions of dollars, the largest NSPs are under pressure to get business models working that, in a very competitive arena, generate acceptable profits. As a result, Quality of Service issues continue to be of grerat concern. Just as the airlines would not survive well with only economy class traffic, so the commercial Internet is looking for a business model to provide it with something more pricey than simple best effort delivery of customer's packets - something that, as Christian Huitema pointed out to us, with current high packet loss rates, is going rather poorly.

In 1996 the industry thought it had the answer in the RSVP protocol. But 1997 saw the failure of RSVP to become a viable delivery mechanism - in part because it was first thought of three years ago in terms of servicing video on demand. But, what was needed was something much more fine grained in order to accomodate the short staccato bursts of web traffic that have, in the meantime become, the signature of Internet traffic.

By the end of 1997 a new answer was emerging: differentiated services focused on the use of precedence bits in the headers of IP packets. The integrated services IETF working group mail list, created to work in tandem with RSVP, was refashioned along the lines of differentiated services where there would be "first class" packets that could be charged for at higher prices.

Service quality issues are taking on an ever broader meaning. In an article by Gary Anthes in the 12/29/97 issue of Computerworld, BBN's John Curran is quoted as saying: performance guarantees across different Internet providers will evolve from metrics developed by industry-specific groups of users. For example, the Automotive Industry Action Group [see COOK Report interview on pp. 64 -69 below] is certifying net providers for adherence to standards in security, reliability and throughput among other things. Curran says more such industry groups will emerge this year, and "in two or three years, you'll see a set of specs for business-grade Internet service that has commonality among them."

IP Telephony Takes a Great Leap Forward

By the end of 1997 voice over the Internet - not video - looked to be the killer application for differentiated services. It was seen that giving voice packets preference over the delivery of data would be a cost effective way of multiplexing Internet telephony applications inside of customer's regular leased lines. For presumably the only other way to serve such mission critical applications as voice (a business' telephone service) would be to purchase separate leased lines - just for voice traffic.

With the introduction of Internet telephony gateways made by VocalTec, Vienna Systems, and Micom into corporate LANs in 1997, Internet telphony came of age as a serious business application. Now with the proper provisioning of a corporate intranet, it was possible to attach the gateway server to the LAN where it would mediate with the PBX in each office. The result was that these gateways (costing about $1,000 a port could take the offices' voice traffic away from the measured use and billing of the public switched telephone network and place it on the unmeasured and unbilled corporate intranet. Corporations connected world-wide via a single Internet provider are beginning to use these gateways to move all their intra-corporate phone traffic off the PSTN and onto the Internet - something that, especially with international phone calls, will promise tremendous cost savings.

One can theorize, with almost all the major internet backbone players owned by phone companies as the result of consolidation seen in 1997, that the phone companies may go a little slow in introducing internet telephony.

This is not as likely to happen as one might suppose. Why? Because introducing IP telephony, in many cases, will allow one phone company to make an end run around the other into markets of its competitors and, once this happens, the company that has been on the receiving end of the end run has little choice except to fight back by introducing the technology as well. Indeed one significant player has been heard to say that the only way for a phone copmpany to survive the on coming onslaught is to cannibalize its non internet based services as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately this revolution may not come cost free. According to Scott Bradner, in the above cited Computerworld article: In 1998, the transfer of traffic from the public telephone network to the Internet will invite the scrutiny of federal regulators who have until now not touched the Internet, Bradner warns. "It's going to be a wrenching thing when they start putting regulations, taxes, universal access charges, line fees and all that on the data service," he says. "I fully expect it to happen because regulators don't like to see revenue streams go down."

IP Everywhere?

We are hearing for the first time some startling assertions - namely that such is the momentum behing the IP based interoperable services of the Internet that it could swallow not only telephony but all of telecommunications. A few people are beginning to talk about connection oriented traditional telephone service having only a three to five year life span.

On December 22 in Tokyo we interviewed Dr. Hiroshi Fujiwara, President and CEO of the Internet Research Institute. Dr. Fujiwara told us that not only were Japanese railways and power companies entering the internet business, but that many in Japan, and especially the consumer electronics industry, were interested in a conversion to IP v6 as soon as possible. Why? Because the consumer electronics industry would like to see every device it makes have a unique internet address as soon as possible. This is something that, long discussed in a theoretical sense, is now finally being examined as a concrete goal.

Bill St Arnaud, the Director of Network Projects at CANARIE, Inc. (Canadian Advanced Network for Research, Industry and Education) talks of Internet 2 related research as having heavy empahsis on Quality of Service applications and, with a sly smile, mentions what he calls Internet 3 - the designing of new communication networks from the TCP/IP level downwartd for only TCP/IP. He maintains that a part of Qwest's network is being designed in this way and says that the same holds true for Project Oxygen, Neil Tagare's attempt to get the major carriers to lay a new swath of globe circling fiber.

What is beyond dispute is that we are both driving up the amount of data that a single fiber can carry and laying vast new amounts of the stuff. At the same time more than half a dozen global wireless systems are soon going to come online. It seems that we have built our way out of any real shortage and are standing on the cusp of a Gilderian plenitude. Certainly if all the industry had learned to do was best effort delivery one might worry about what this new bandwidth would do to industrty pricing in the sense of rendering service so cheap as to cause a pricing collapse. But, as we have seen, even should bandwidth become as cheap as transistors are today, we will likely use it in huge quantities. Moreover, money spent for value added services on top of the bandwidth could come to excede that spent for commodity bandwidth itself.

Politics with a Vengeance

Unfortunately, while our technology brilliance increases, our political soundness of mind does not. The RBOCs are busily using the travesty of the 1996 Telecommunications Reform Act to enrich themselves and make the rest of us pay dearly for having the temerity to think that they would permit competition at the local exchange level. It is hard to imagine anything but harm coming from the New Year's Eve decision of Judge Kendall in US District Court in Witchita Falls, Texas overturning the Act's Section 271 requirements that the RBOCs show they were allowing competition at the local level before being allowed to offer long distance services.

In the meantime the Universal Service portion of the act designating the availability of funds for public school and library internet connectivity is turning into a huge boondoggle. The shame is that Judge Kendall dindn't overturn this $2.25 billion dollar a year tax on rate payers. The schools and libraries aren't ready. What we have being forced down our throats is a new bureucracy headed by a president with a $200,000 a year salary. And a staff that makes the unconscionable blunder of sending the RBOCs laughing all the way to the bank by declaring wireless ineligable for the federal subsidies. Congress or the courts should kill this pork barrel before it becomes worse.

Unfortunately, this cesspool is not the only political problem dogging the Internet. Governance, or Internet Management as insiders would call it, has become a contentious crisis. The dispute over DNS service created an IANA/ISOC led attempt at reform which has been sadly mismanaged. On the surface of things IAHC was a group with a charter that should have worked to everyone's satisfaction. That it did not speaks to the presumed arrogance of those who thought that a small committee of Internet 'old boys" could in a few weeks of private discussion decide late last year what they wanted to do and then, at the last minute, go public.

With an ITU member (Robert Shaw), the group decided to involve the ITU in its process by asking it to be the repository of the IAHC's Memorandum of Understanding. This decision profoundly unnerved a number of internet old hands like Tony Rutkowski who were intimately familiar with the generally Internet hostile views of the foreigh PTTs that make up the ITU's Governing Council.

The Brian Kahin and Becky Burr led Interagency Task Force on Domain Names tried to sort out the DNS mess only to almost totally screw up IP allocation by opposing ARIN. As we watched the bumbling of the task force, we looked with disgust on the Clinton Adminsitration intervention which, it seemed, had been created out of fear of the IAHC-ITU DNS solution. What happened next was ironic because as time passed the IPOC/CORE reincarnation led by Dave Crocker on the net began to react to its critics with an arrogance remioniscent of Network Solutions alleged sins as the sole monopolist for .com. By the end of the summer it seemed that we were trading one monopolist for another. What's more, Kahin's group of largely ignorant feds had become convinced that Network Solutions was an evil monopoly after all. They were now ready to throw the weight of the US government on the IPOC/CORE scales by legitimising a highly controversial effort that claimed the right to register only its self appointred seven new TLDs.

As we watched Kahin trying to engineer his own solution by picking a group just as arrogant as Network Solutions could have every hope to have been, we saw a stampede of registrars to the CORE trough in October. We also saw other DNS coallitions with working infrastructure being excluded. Finally we read the Pekka Tarjanne interview where the ITU Secretary General said that he had concluded after all that the ITU would be the apprpriate governing body for the Internet. We had enough at that point and came out fully against the IPOC/CORE group.

Fortunately, when he realized how badly Kahin and Burr were doing, Ira Magaziner entered the frey himself and took over the policy review. Magaziner has at least had the sense to realize how complex and tough this situation is and to understand that in October he didn't know enough to make the right decisions.

From the first of December into early January Magaziner engaged in a large number of discussions with the stake holders. He has in our opinion acted properly to put a road bloc on CORE's forward rush to try to get its names into the root servers. He is trying to fashion a solution that will let the internet remain self-organizing. We are quite impressed at the reports we get of his level of understanding of the technical details. We are hopeful that he can pronounce a fair decision and make it stick through a wind down period running from now until October 1. Policy is expected to be announced on the White House Web pages before the final week of January.

Triumph of the Stupid Network

The multi-trillion dollar global telecommunications industry is ultimately at stake. Companies that didn't exist ten years ago are spending billions to build a new infrastructure of big, fast pipes to replace the phone companies' "intelligent" networks. Vast amounts of new fiber are being laid and rapid advances in wave divsion multiplexing are increasing the carrying capacity of this fiber far beyond what was recently thought possible. Wireless technologies, including spread spectrum, are taking off. Some seven different "Internet-in-the-sky" systems are under development with deployment three to five years off. So it seems that bandwidth - somewhat scarce for a few more months - is likely to become cheap and plentiful. We see no show stoppers for the present reality -- a fat dumb and happy Internet that connects users who have PCs with the power of older phone company mainframes on their desk tops. The control of this stupid network is now in user's hands.

Phone companies have two choices: cannibalization of their existing infratructure, or to fight and stall and delay to preserve their archaic empires. In the coming year it will be instructive, with the major Internet players, now in the hands of phone companies, to see which companies try to lead and which try to fight the changes. We argue that this communications revolution will be won by those who offer users the best set of cost-effective dumb pipes. We also argue that, with companies like Qwest determined to become Internet provbiders themselves, the pressure on the phone companies not to stick together in resisting change will be great.

The choice is likely to be one of joining the revolution or being swept away by it. To survive, countless executives will have to overturn their own world views. We argue that success will come to those who adopt new technology and use it quickly to cannibalize existing operations. These people must decentralize their control over the choice of intelligent applications by placing them into hands of end users who then will drive the pace of change by running them over a stupid network.

January 12, 1988

CONTENTS AND SECTION SUMMARIES

Building Internet Infrastructure contains the full text of 58 articles appearing in the COOK Report on Internet between March 1997 and February 1998. They are organized into six sections and presented either in chronological or subject matter order within each section. They are also indexed (about 450 subjects) on pages 303 - 307 of the report. Each section is introduced by an executive summary (written especially for this volume) that explains where and how the material contained in that section fits into the "bigger picture" . The articles in each section are also preceded by their individual executive summaries. The report is structured to guide the reader, through a series of gradual steps starting with the summary and leading to increased levels of detailed description of the way in which the complex systems that make up the Internet fit together and interoperate.

Contents

Building Internet Infratsructure Editor's introduction and a Summary of the Operational Environment in January 1998 p. 1

Part One: Key Operational & Technology Changes

Executive Summary p. 5

On the Eve of Revolutions in Network Architecture, Bandwidth, & IP Telephony p. 7

Internet Telephony Gateways Mature, Use in Corporate Intranets Allows Inter-office Phone Calls Around World to Exit PSTN p. 13

IP sec to Yield Major Operations Impact, Protocol Debuts as Part of Public Key Exchange and Authentication System Not Vulnerable to Key Escrow p. 22

Wireless Becoming Viable Local Loop: Dave Hughes Reports on NSF Wireless Field Tests p. 28

Part Two: Internet Performance: Quality of Service, Performance Measurement, Service Quality

Executive Summary p. 39

Paul Mockapetris on Quality of Service and Progress of @Home & Cable Modem p. 41

Merit Developing New Tools for Provider Cooperation & Performance Measurement p. 45

New Tools for Technical Cooperation Between NSPs: Cooperative Asociation for Internet Data Analysis to Act as Neutral Ground for Promoting Internetwork Reliability p. 49

Using the Web to Measure NSP Performance, Jeff Sedayao Talks about Intel's Experience, p. 55

Internet Performance Measurement Debated,Continued Discussion of Keynote Backbone Measurement Tests Shows Complexity of Variables Affecting Performance, p. 59

ISP Certification Yields New Business Model Manager of ANX Overseer Explains Procedures by Which Large ISPs Will Launch Auto Industry VPN p. 64

Huitema: Quality of Service is Complex Mix of Technology, Customer Expectations, Economics, & Network Provisioning p. 70

A Two-bit Differentiated Services Internet Architecture p. 76

Part Three: Internet Architecture -- Peering and Transit Who Sets the Cost of Connection to the Internet?

Executive Summary p. 78

When Would Restrictive Peering Become Restraint of Trade? Should Big Five Entertain Local Route Peering at Public Exchanges? p. 80

Filtering Proposed to Prevent Routing ÒCheatingÓ at FDDI Exchange Points p. 82

Letter to the Editor: Tier One vs Tier N Providers - Sean Doran January 18, 1997 p. 84

UUNET and Sprint End No Charge Peering, UUNET Claims Smaller Backbones Taking Unfair Advantage of its Facilities -- UUNETÕs Justification Disputed p. 85

David Holub Explains Model of an Open Peering, Open Inter Connect, "Bill and Keep" Internet p. 94

An ISP's View of the Evolution of Peering, David Holub, Founder of WENet, Discusses Interconnection Issues from 1995 Closure of NSFnet Through Spring 1997 Moves to End Free Peering p. 97

John Curran Lauds GTE Internetworking and Forecasts Peering Changes in 1998 Consolidation - But for Whom? Internet Business Models in the Post 1996 Telecom Deregulation Era p. 103

Randy Bush Discusses Technical & Economic Details of Peering & Routing Policy at Level of the Large Backbones p. 111

Exchange Point Connectivity Mapped by Sean Donelan p. 116

Part Four: Routers and Routing Tables

Executive Summary p. 120

Internet Routing Technology: Network Growth Brings Stability & Scaling Problems - Noel Chiappa Interview Offers Routing Technologies Tutorial & Explains Why BGP Replacement Needed p. 121

Why Aggregation is a Difficult Tool to Use in Solving Routing Scaling and Stability Issues -- Routing Expert Curtis Villamizar Speaks Out p. 130

Tony Bates Explains the CIDR Report, Only about 25% of Advertised Routes Are CIDR Aggregates -- Report Helps Identify Leakage p. 131

Sean Doran Seeds NANOG Discussion Which Includes /19 Filtering Policy, Loose Source Routing, Improved NAT Capabilities, Traffic Patterns and NOC Contacts p. 135

IPv6 -- A Solution in Search of a Problem? NANOG Discussion Shows that IPv4 Address Space and Routing Problems Are Likely to Be Solved By NAT or By Intelligent Routing Technologies p. 141

Network Address Translation Devices Seen as Solution to Shortage of Routable Address Blocks, While Vastly Improved NAT Boxes Enable Some to Avoid Renumbering, They Break Some Protocols p. 149

Part Five: Internet from the Provider Side -- Business Model Analysis and Case Studies at the National, Backbone and Regional Level

Executive Summary p. 154

Two Interviews with Sprint Management Show Significant Sprintlink Organizational Changes p. 156

John Curran Discusses Moves to Have FCC Remove ISP Access Charge Exemption p. 164

AttorneyÕs View of ISP Survival & Prosperity A ÒGuideÓ to the Impact of 96 Telecom Act on ISPs Common Carrier Status - Costs and Benefits p. 168

Verio Buys GES which Keeps Name While ex-CEO Heker Is Severed from All Involvement p. 175

Jack Buchanan Offers Insights into Needs of Cost Effective Grass Roots Telecom p. 176

Global Internet Infrastructure: Early Topology and Four Current Strategies Compaired p. 178

How To Choose an Upstream Provider, Sean Donelan Talks about Variables of Location, Pricing and Service to Evaluate in Selecting National Backbone Provider p. 182

Mid-Sized ISPs Compare Costs of Dial Up Connections Margins at $19.95 a Month Unlimited Are Lean But Viable p. 184

Kent England Comments on CLEC ILEC War p. 187

Russian Internet Thrives in Moscow; Grows in St. Petersburg Rosstelecom Maintains All Powerful PTT Role as Digital Links Come to Provincial Cities p. 188

IBM Global Net Takes Advantage of V-Net Reach to Become $19.95 Dial up Global ISP p. 189

AGIS - Witnessing the Self Destruction of a Network Pariah p.193

Editorial -Consolidation's Coming: Beware Beware and Welcome John Sidgemore, Economics BA and Turn Around Expert, as Likely Successor to Vint Cerf p. 194

Part Six: Internet Governance or Management?

Executive Summary p .196

February 97: Creation of American Registry for Internet Numbers Announced p. 204

April 97 : Domain Name Service Under Stress Can IAHC Solution Work or Is NSI Unassailable? Could Legal Action Challenge Authority of IANA? p. 206

May 97: Clinton Administration Embraces DNS Tar Baby, Magaziner & OMB Responsible Action Derails Agreement with Network Solutions & NSF to End Co-operative Agreement on April 1 1997 p. 212

Some Source Documents with Our Interpretations Added, Magaziner Interview, NSI Database Summary & Explanation, Rutkowski, Crocker & Dillon on IAHC, the Ambler Law Suit, Linda Sundro Makes Policy p. 216

CIX, NSI & Rutkowski Favor Current U.S. Intervention Against IAHC DNS Plan IANA Authority & ARIN Still Critical Unsolved Problem IAHC February 4 Plan Generates Intense Opposition p.223

CIX, Citing Failure of Process with IAHC, Cites Custodial Duty of US GovÕt to Maintain Stability, Calls for an IANA Authority Accepted by US Government p. 227

July - August 97: ARIN Approved! Magaziner Breaks Log Jam Administration Makes Ninth Inning Move Helpful to Net Signs of Leadership Emerge from Sea of Hesitation - Government Wide NOI on DNS Expected Shortly p. 231

Rudolph Geist, USIPA Lawyer: ARIN is Unneeded Monopoly - Action Threatened by Unknown ISP Association Lawyer Shows Lack of ISP Business Issues Awarenes p. 241

IAHCÕs Seven New Top Level Domains Will Confuse Customers -- Donna Hoffman Finds the Domains: ÒDisaster Waiting to Happen From a Business PerspectiveÓ p. 244

September 97: Internet Governance Not Scaling Well IANA & IP Number Registry Policy Need Formalizing - NSF Tells NSI Not to Enter New Top Level Domains NSI Operational Failures & Direction of US Government Policy Could Give Impetus to Move of DNS Operations to Europe as Opening of ARIN Delayed p. 245

Part I: Registry Policy, pp. 246 Part II: IANA Authority, pp. 251 Part III: Launching ARIN, pp. 257 Part IV: DNS, IANA and US Government on a Collision Course?, pp. 259

October 97:DNS Problems Continue, ARIN Open for Business, A Look at Technical Issues Involved in Moving "dot" -- IANA Seems to Think itself Problem Free But Is Losing Authority p.264

November 97: Administration of .us Domain Gradually Changing, But Volunteer Effort Run with Good Intentions Fails to Be Fully Responsive to Needs of Commercial Network p. 271

Editorial: Clinton - Gore Selling out Internet to ITU to Preserve Key Escrow Encryption? p. 276

January 98: Internet Governance Wars: We Find IWG & IPOC Anatgonism to Network Solutions is Only Crisis, Divergent Agendas Endanger "Bounded Chaos" Nurturing Creative Foundation of Internet Technology Development p. 279

FOIA For Brian Kahin's Meetings on CORE Database Issues Finally Pays Off p. 291

In Face of Mounting Evidence & 900 non Responsive Documents p.293 from OSTP, We Submitt New FOIA Aimed at Taskforce Activity with IBM, DEC, and AT&T

Appendix - July Aug. Issue:The NSF Inspector General's Plan to Administer and Tax the Internet World Wide [Rejected on April 17, 1997 ] p. 296

Index p. 303

Contents p. 308

THE AUDIENCE FOR THE HANDBOOK

Within the national Internet service provider community, "Building Internet Infrastructure" is intended to enable strategists understand the complexities facing their engineering and operations staff. Among smaller ISPs it should serve as a tool to bring owner-operators, who are busy 18 hours a day ordering lines, installing them and servicing their customers, up to speed on the changes going on in the environment in which they must operate. LECs and other phone companies will also find it useful. Finally familiarity with the issues discussed within the Handbook will provide corporate MIS people with a valuable knowledge base from which to negotiate with their present or future internet service providers.

However, since these infrastructure issues are also critical to the continued growth and success of the industry, this "Handbook" is expected to be a tool for use by those in the banking and investment community. If those in the financial community understand the changing technical and power relationships in the industry, they will be able to improve the quality of their investment decision making. It should also be useful to corporate strategic planners who will be advising their companies' decision making in Internet applications for vertical industry markets.

PRICES AND HOW TO ORDER BUILDING INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE :

Building Internet Infrastructure is priced at $395.00 per copy . The standard form is double sided xeroxed, GBC bound. A site license copy is shipped single sided laser printed.

Current site license subscribers to the COOK Report may have site license privileges for the desk top published copy at the same $395 cost. Those who are not subscribers to the COOK Report may save 5% on the cost of a subscription if they order both at the same time. The report will be available in acsii form for markup and posting on an employee only intranet for $1250. Those with web based site license subscriptions may order the report for adding to their webs at $900. Single use ascii copies at less than $900 are not available.

Volume Two in this series is still available. Evolving Internet Infrastructure, an Anthology of Articles from the COOK Report on Internet for $375.

Inquiries by email welcomed. But orders should be placed by phone and confirmed by fax.

Please Contact:

cook@cookreport.com

(609) 882-2572