Internet is broken and what to do about it is unclear

The fact that globally the Internet is “broken” known for a long time and is not a special secret for anyone.

The flexibility and independence of the components built in the Internet architecture in its present form have become, an anchor pulling down. This does not concern us - end-users. Except that Facebook, or another vital service, may load slower than usual.

But at the level below, the global routing of traffic flows, often there is a real hell - Tier 1 providers are fighting among each other or organize coalition against 3d provider; telecom operators battle with the Internet companies and route their traffic through remote locations. Even traffic exchange points put sticks in wheels to their customers, and the cherry on the cake are constant changes in BGP announces. And the last point should be highlighted separately because of the mass and seriousness of the problem.

With enviable regularity, the news appears that some large ASNs are sent to the black hole (YouTube and Pakistan). One African ISP shut down Google this way, and in April `17 Visa and Mastercard networks were announced from Russia, and so on.

In addition to human (I want to believe) mistakes, there are hacker attacks associated with BGP hijacking. So far, there are only a few such attacks, but their number is growing, as does the danger they carry.

The IETF is working to solve the problem as it can: additions and extensions to BGP are being developed to eliminate routing hijacking and minimizing possible accidents and consequences.

And a third, party - global cloud providers - has emerged. Internet businesses, whether Facebook, Google, or local players, like Yandex in Russia, have long history and experience of building private fiber cable networks and CDNs to streamline routes and delivery of content. They do not care how and where the content is delivered, the main thing is to do it quickly and efficiently.

The situation with global providers is different: they cannot afford the fall of any data center, and the quality of network access should be as high as possible. Including the connection between the regions on different continents. To achieve additional links are built being not publically available or shared but for private use only. And to avoid participation in Tier 1 wars or being affected by those, cloud providers or owners of such cable become a kind of Tier 1 providers themself. In fact, a decent chunk of cloud provider traffic doesn`t leave the network of a cloud provider. The situation is complicated further due to SD-WAN solutions offered by a cloud provider as it makes everything route traffic into its own network and avoids routing using external networks.

In general, it`s a logical step for the cloud provider: DC and interconnects present in main traffic exchange points and major cities, CDN PoP distributed in secondary EX, and smaller cities. Between all of these components backbone exists, so why not offer optimization of ingress/egress traffic to the clients?

As a result, from the point of view of routing, the modern Internet is not a full mesh, but rather several different large parallel internets, and the evolution of this situation yet is not quite clear.