[menog] PCH Peering Survey 2021 - English Version

[sara alamin]

*Background:*

Five and ten years ago PCH conducted comprehensive global surveys
characterizing Internet peering agreements. They are the only ones of their
kind, and are relied upon by legislators and regulators throughout the
world to understand the Internet interconnection landscape.

Our write-ups of the prior surveys can be found here:

https://www.pch.net/resources/Papers/peering-survey/PCH-Peering-Survey-2011.pdf


https://www.pch.net/resources/Papers/peering-survey/PCH-Peering-Survey-2016/PCH-Peering-Survey-2016.pdf


…and video of the NANOG presentation of the 2016 results is here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPuoBmxyXMc


At the time of the 2011 survey, we committed to repeating the survey every
five years, to provide time-series data about the direction peering trends
take. We’re now conducting the third iteration of the survey.

Among other things, the surveys have helped establish a better
understanding of trends in:

• The increasingly uniform global norms of interconnection

• National preferences within the network operator community for country of
governing law

• The long tail of small networks which don’t yet support IPv6 routing

• The significance of multilateral peering agreements in the density of the
interconnection mesh


These findings, particularly the first, have been invaluable in giving
regulators in the vast majority of the world’s countries a data-driven
basis for refraining from prescriptively regulating Internet
interconnection. They have demonstrated in objective terms that the
Internet self-regulates in a way that’s more globally uniform and closely
harmonized than any coordination of national regulatory bodies could
accomplish.


*Participation:*

The survey is global in scope, and our goal is to reflect the diversity of
peering agreements in the world. Your participation ensures that your norms
and ways of doing business are represented accurately and proportionately
in the dataset. If you don’t participate, the way you do business will be
less well-represented in the data, and will seem less normal to regulators
and policy-makers. We’re interested in large ISPs and small ISPs, ISPs
in Afghanistan and in Zimbabwe, bilateral agreements and multilateral,
private and public. Our intent is to be as comprehensive as possible. In
2011, the responses we received represented 4,331 networks in 96 countries,
or 86% of the world’s ISPs at that time. In 2016, responses
represented 10,794 networks in 148 countries, or 60% of the world’s ISPs in
2016. Our aim is to be equally inclusive this year.

Since our principal method of soliciting participation is via NOG mailing
lists, I’m afraid many of you will see this message several times, on
different lists, for which we apologize.



*Privacy:*

In 2011 and 2016, we promised to collect the smallest set of data necessary
to answer the questions, to perform the analysis immediately, and not to
retain the data after the analysis was accomplished. In that way, we
ensured that the privacy of respondents was fully protected. We did as we
said, no data was leaked, and the whole community benefited from the trust
that was extended to us. We ask for your trust again now as we make the
same commitment to protect the privacy of all respondents, using the same
process as was successfully employed the last two times. We are asking for
no more data than is absolutely necessary. We will perform the analysis
immediately upon receiving all of the data. We will delete the data once
the analysis has been performed.


*The Survey:*

We would like to know your Autonomous System Number, and the following five
pieces of information relative to each other AS you peer with:

• *Your peer’s ASN* (peers only, not upstream transit providers or
downstream customers)
• *Whether a written and signed peering agreement exists* (the alternative
being a less formal arrangement, such as a "handshake agreement")
• *Whether the terms are roughly symmetric* (the alternative being that
they describe an agreement with different terms for each of the two
parties, such as one compensating the other, or one receiving more or fewer
than full customer routes)
• *Whether a jurisdiction of governing law is defined*
• *Whether IPv6 routes are being exchanged* (this year, we’ll still assume
that IPv4 are)

The easiest way for us to receive the information is as a tab-text or CSV
file or an Excel spreadsheet, consisting of rows with the following columns:

Your ASN: Integer

Peer ASN: Integer

Written agreement: Boolean  [true,1,yes,y] or [false,0,no,n]

Symmetric: Boolean  [true,1,yes,y] or [false,0,no,n]

Governing Law: ISO 3166 two-digit country-code, or empty

IPv6 Routes: Boolean [true,1,yes,y] or [false,0,no,n]


For instance:

42 <tab> 715 <tab> false <tab> true <tab> us <tab> true <cr>

42 <tab> 3856 <tab> true <tab> true <tab> us <tab> true <cr>


We need the ASNs so we can avoid double-counting a single pair of peers
when we hear from both of them, and so that when we hear about
a relationship in responses from both peers we can see how closely the two
responses match, an important check on the quality of the survey.  As soon
as we've collated the data, we will protect your privacy by discarding the
raw data of the responses, and only final aggregate statistics will be
published. We will never disclose any ASN or any information about any ASN.

If you’re peering with an MLPA route-server, you’re welcome to include just
the route-server’s ASN, if that’s easiest, rather than trying to include
each of the peer ASNs on the other side of the route-server. Either way is
fine.

If all of your sessions have the same characteristics, you can just tell us
what those characteristics are once, your own ASN once, and give us a
simple list of your peer ASNs.

If your number of peers is small enough to be pasted or typed into an
email, rather than attached as a file, and that’s simpler, just go ahead
and do that.

If you have written peering agreements that are covered by non-disclosure
agreements, or if your organizational policy precludes disclosing your
peers, but you’d still like to participate in the survey, please let us
know, and we’ll work with whatever information you’re able to give us and
try to ensure that your practices are statistically represented in our
results.

If you're able to help us, please email me the data in whatever form you
can. If you need a non-disclosure, we're happy to sign one.

Finally, if there are questions you’d like us to try to answer when we
analyze the data, please suggest them, and if there are any additional
questions you’d like us to include in future iterations of the survey,
please let us know so that we can consider including them in the 2026
survey.


*Please respond by replying to this email, by the middle of November, two
weeks from now.*

Thank you for considering participating. We very much appreciate it, and we
look forward to returning the results to the community.
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