[Outages-discussion] Hypothetical: isolating a single AS from the world?

[David Eddleman]

There's a couple things here to unpack. Granted, you'll need to bear with
my technical knowledge as I'm definitely not a master of gateway protocols.

Technical: From my understanding, you'd just need all neighborhood ASNs to
stop advertising routes. That would cut them off and sever links. Depending
upon ASN size and bandwidth trunking, they could just hit the big
connections and have them suffer an effective DoS, but how practical either
scenario is depends heavily on the ASN size and connections.

Legal: BLUF: IANAL. This would likely (within the US at least, I can't
speak for other countries) fall under contract disputes, as ASNs would
likely set up contracts between each other for providing quality of
service, uptime, bandwidth, throttling, etc. If there's an existing
contract that can easily bring about civil action due to breach of contract
unless there's an obvious get-out-jail clause. AFAIK there's no actual
criminal code, at least on the Federal level, that requires
interconnections. If civil action is followed, an injunction can be placed
to stop/restore the peering while the suit is being resolved, but that's up
to a court to grant. And also assuming that the peer is located within the
US. If Level3 peered with a completely foreign entity, and that entity
decided to cut their links, you can accurately guess which digit they'll
show to a US court order that demanded they restore it.

Historical: It's happened before. Remember back in 2006 or thereabouts when
Level3 and Cogent had a contract dispute, so they broke their peering
agreements overnight? It caused a lot of things on the internet to break
for several hours until routing was repaired. I know of at least one
datacenter operator who had attempted intimidation thrown at him by
representatives to get equipment. That's just the first example that comes
to mind of significant severity, I'm sure with a little digging it's
happened more times.

On Mon, Apr 25, 2022 at 5:25 PM Chapman, Brad (NBCUniversal) <
Brad.Chapman at nbcuni.com> wrote:

> Hello Outages-Discussion,
>
>
>
> As a hypothetical exercise, what would it take—technically, legally, or
> otherwise—to disconnect a single autonomous system from the rest of the
> world for "disruptive activity" originating from that entity, and is such
> disconnection allowed under certain cases, like cyberattacks, terrorism, or
> threats of the same?
>
>
>
> And what could said entity do—technically, legally, or otherwise—to stop
> the withdrawal of routes connecting to it?
>
>
>
> Do existing telecommunications laws in Western Europe and the US generally
> *require* the free and open connection of autonomous systems regardless
> of what is transmitted across them?  The FCC Net Neutrality rules are the
> closest legal framework I could find.
>
>
>
> The example I had in mind for today is AS13414
> <https://bgp.he.net/AS13414>.
>
>
>
> Would love to hear everyone's thoughts on this and if it's ever been done
> before.
>
>
>
> Cheers,
>
> Brad
> _______________________________________________
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>
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