 Welcome everyone to our very special discussion today on internet routing and how critical it is to the way our data communications moves and the technology that's coming to trend right now, again, critical to the way we communicate. Today we are joined by prominent members of this initiative, and I'm really honored to introduce you to Dr. Joseph Lorenzo Hall, a distinguished technologist at Internet Society, ISAC, the Strong Internet, the Internet Society. Also joining me today is Lewis Fialo, the vice president of CTA. I'm going to start with you today, Dr. Hall. Can you tell us a little bit about ISAC, what you do, and what is your mission? Yes, thank you so much. The Internet Society was founded about 30 years ago, our 30 year anniversary is next year, and it's all about making sure the internet is for everyone. Our mission is to support and promote the development of the internet around the world, both in terms of making it stronger, which is what I focus on, and making it bigger, which is making sure that half of humanity that doesn't have access to the internet now will get it. We can't do this alone. As you can see today, we have very important partners. We have 87,000 individual members, 87 organizational members, organizations that believe in what we do. 127 chapters around the world working together to make the internet bigger and stronger and more available for everyone around the world. That is incredible. Tell us, why is routing security important to the internet? Sure thing. When people think about the internet, they don't often think about it's kind of like plumbing. People make fun of saying it's tubes, but in some sense you have to get the bits around the internet to go certain places. And in order to do that, we use what's called internet routing. And internet routing, unfortunately, is pretty creaky. It's like a house with old lead pipes in some sense. And so we have to work on shoring those pipes up. And it's really the key of having a trustworthy internet. If the information can't move around the internet, well, then you have a broken internet. You have one that just cannot fulfill the desires that we want, especially in the kinds of time that we want when we want it right now. Well said, well said. And so we're hearing a lot of headlines today about manners. So what is manners and why did ISOC really rally the internet operator community to create it? Yeah, so manners is an acronym, M-A-N-R-S, the Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security Initiative. And when we want to secure the routes, secure these, you know, shore up these pipes that allow the information to flow around the internet, we realized a lot of it is not just about individuals doing things, it's about groups of people getting together and protecting regions of the internet. And so we agreed, we realized that we don't need new technology, we need new norms, new ways of behaving. And it's an interestingly led initiative that builds on best practices that are all about, you know, essentially network hygiene, making sure your network is not polluting the internet and making sure that the stuff that comes into your network is dealt with sort of in a hygienic way, so to speak, that you don't have dirty stuff flying around inside your network, so to speak. And that creates really great partnerships. So, Lewis, tell us about China Telecom America, CTA, and how you're involved with manners. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having us in Dr. Hall. It's great to have you here as well. I think this initiative is very important for our industry. You know, it's sort of ironic that we're talking about, I mean, it's actually opportunistic that we're at ITW, one of the world's largest telecommunications conferences in the world. And we're getting an opportunity to talk a little bit about this. So for us, China Telecom, we saw this, we started learning about manners in 2018. At that time, we saw it, you know, as one of the largest IP internet routing companies in the world, with the largest base of users in the world, we obviously fit our needs, right, as part of our social responsibility to build a more stronger internet, a more confident internet where everybody would trust the internet. And we started that initiative in 2020. I was glad to see that we had one of our first networks, IP networks in the world, accepted. And then in 2021, all our networks were finally accepted. And then we became an evangelist, because not only, as Dr. Hall talked about it, is that there is, it's plumbing, okay, but the plumbing is only as good as all the participants and all the pieces of the plumbing that come together. So for us, we wanted to have, you know, running one of the largest IP networks in the world, we wanted to be at the forefront of this initiative. And it's actually worked out really well, and we're very proud to be part of Manners. And we've actually, in many ways, we believe we help other people understand the commitment and stuff. But, you know, we've made the investment, and more importantly, we've made the commitment to continue to support Manners and the Internet Society as we continue down this path together. Yeah, so well said. And in Dr. Hall, as we rely more and more on the Internet and connectivity partners like CTA, they have to work harder to make sure their networks are secure. So what's the problem, if you will, with Border Gateway protocol, BGP? And what can operators do about it? Wonderful. So we're going to get a little nerdy, so you have to forgive me because I'm definitely a nerd. When we created the protocols that run the Internet, we created all of them not secure because, you know, we were just tinkering around in the 70s and the 80s and showing my age. And so we had to actually build security into these things. And BGP was developed in such a way that it didn't have a lot of security. Everyone knew each other at the time. You didn't need a lot of that. It has no built-in mechanism to validate the routing announcements. It's just the way that pieces of plumbing tell you all the other pieces of plumbing where to go on the Internet. There are some technical solutions available and Manners creates a baseline that all network operators can use. And this includes things like filtering route announcements, filtering bad ones that you know are bad, preventing what's called IP address spoofing so that someone can't change the from address and end up sending things in the wrong way, maintaining up-to-date contact information so you know you can find a human if something's going wrong with the network, and then validating routes so others can verify what's actually legitimate. There's a few different ways to validate routes, two main ways. One is putting your routes in something called an Internet Route Registry, an IRR, and a newer version is cryptographic. So it's a little bit more secure because it uses very complicated math that I barely understand called RPKI or Resource Public Key Infrastructure. And that's one way to allow people to prove that you're able to tell people to come to your network for certain kinds of resources. Oh, I love that, I love that. And another fact that I came across in our research here that I was really intrigued by, Manners grew from 588 network provider participants to 750 in 2021. I mean that's tremendous. Why is this mission, Lewis, so important to CTA? And what needs to happen to encourage more providers like yourselves to get involved? Yeah, so if you think about what we're doing, you know, China Telecom is a tier one operator, okay? So we operate at the top level of the Internet Pyramid, right? But if we actually provide a platform where people are either using our delivery mechanism of our IP network, or transiting through our network, and making sure that what traverses through our network is the right information, the correct information, what happens is all of a sudden the people that are benefiting below us are tier two or tier three operators, okay? All of a sudden get the same benefit of a clean network as they're going through. And that's really important because the Internet has become so important, you know, given all the things that have happened to us in the last couple of years to have a robust Internet. And to have a network that is actually very, people rely on and actually feel confident, you know, so eliminating some of the issues that Dr. Hall just talked about. So for us, it was really like a no-brainer and something that we felt that we would actually take a lot of pride in pushing and supporting, not only in our network, but also through our efforts to educating other people about joining Manors and continue to do this. And maybe in the future we'll have it double this size and adding more. So exciting, so exciting. And Dr. Hall, is Manors just four large providers like CTA? Who else do you encourage to join? So there's something for everyone when it comes to practicing good manners. There are four programs, so it's not just network operators like what we've been talking about, but there's also Internet exchange points, these buildings in which all these networks connect together, all sorts of weird stuff can happen there. CDNs like Netflix and other folks that want to bring the content closer to the eyeball so it doesn't have to be on the network at all. And then equipment vendors, people who make the hardware that runs the Internet, also can join and show that their equipment can support routing security operations. I just love that, yeah, I love that. Also, Manors really addresses these large gaps that we see making BGP, like you mentioned, safer and more efficient. What are the requirements that participants of Manors needs to follow? And do you have any examples of how Manors has helped? Yeah, so the requirements are a little different. You can imagine a equipment vendor is going to be able to do different things than someone who operates a bunch of networks. In general, they need to do some combination of the following things depending on which program they're part of, excuse me. Filtering route announcements, as I mentioned before, to prevent route leaks and hijacks when someone actually tries to take over your network. Preventing IP address spoofing, making sure that both the two-in-the-from addresses, so to speak, and IP communication are not forged. You've got to keep up-to-date contact information. As I said, it's really important to find a human sometimes. There's global validation, and then there's making sure you monitor and debug certain kinds of tools that help your customers understand these things. And then there's Promoting Manors, which, let me tell you, CTA is an amazing example of that. And we've made excellent progress. One really good example to call out is Twitter. So recently, there appeared to be a Russian network across telecom hijacking Twitter's route. And we were like, oh, geez, this looks like someone trying to mess with Twitter. But it didn't last very long. And the reason it didn't last very long is because Twitter learned from years before when Myanmar had tried to hijack the route to prevent people from going to Twitter. And now Twitter had in place what are called ROAs, ROAs, route object authorizations, which allows other networks to validate whether or not that's a legitimate announcement or not. And so many networks never even accepted that route, never even were fooled by that at all. And that's a really good example. Whereas in the past, with Myanmar, that lasted way longer and propagated really far throughout the internet. This didn't last very long, and it didn't go very far because people in the middle like China Telecom and others are actually filtering those out. And so it never even makes it to their customers. What a fantastic case in point, absolutely. And speaking of CTA, from your perspective, what are your company offering services to customers? What feedback have you received from your customers? Or what benefits can customers expect to experience now? Well, the feedback, actually, this is one of those topics where the feedback has been silent. So what does that mean, right? That means it's working, right? So we're excited. We're actually, you know, people, you know, sometimes routing issues and how it's propagates throughout the global internet is very confusing. And there's a lot of players involved. Obviously, that's, you know, we're just intertwined and that's the way the internet was born. So for us, when we don't hear of these problems, and, you know, for us, it's a testament that manners works. Okay. And for us, it's also important because we are trying to convey this message not only to our direct customers, but to our partners to jump on board because the stronger internet is really depending on everybody following manners, adapting manners. And that's what's going to take, right? And then when they have a stronger foundation, you're going to have a more usable foundation where there's trust in the network itself. So for us, it's been really critical. And ironically, it's one of those things that we just don't get any feedback, which is okay. I love that. I love that. And Dr. Hall, what do you see coming? What's next? How do you plan to keep working together to make the internet more secure? Well, I love that the proof is in the lack of complaints and support requests. That's just amazing. In the future, we're still actively recruiting people to come join manners. And specifically, like Louis said, there are... We love getting these big tier one networks, but there are some tier one networks that just for whatever reason can't do it. So we're going after their tier two customers and other kinds of individuals, networks that haven't done it yet. We still have a really long way to go in terms of what's called deploying RPKI, this cryptographic authentication mechanism It's at about 34% of networks right now and would really like to... In fact, some of my measures at work that depend on how well I do depend on us getting that higher. So I have a vested interest in making sure we get... The row is higher than 34% this year. And given the Twitter example I use, it's not a hard sell because people do not want someone stepping on their network traffic. We're also working to improve the ongoing conformance of manners participants so that they get monthly updates in how well they're doing. And we hope to sometime in the future... The community runs all of this, so I can't guarantee something's going to happen. We're also hoping to offer a higher level of conformance with some auditing built in so that you can know that a network is actively currently supporting the manners actions. I love that. I love that. And from China and telecom America's perspective, Louis, what is next? You know, for us, we continue to make the investments necessary to support manners. We also are big advocates of promoting the manners concept. You know, if you think about where the new internet companies are coming from, cloud companies and all these other technology companies, there are a lot of them being born in Asia. So being one of the largest Asian operators today in the world, we're proud of being able to partake in sharing the importance of this. And our customers, in many cases, are going to get direct benefit, but we want them to also adopt this technology or this manners overall so they can actually benefit. And it just propagates itself slowly around the world, and then we have just a better, stronger internet. Well said, well said. Thank you so much, gentlemen, for your time today and for making the internet a safer, more trustworthy place. We appreciate your efforts. All of us who are so... our whole livelihoods and ways of communicating just dependent on the internet and on all the services, whether we say it or not. So thank you, gentlemen and everyone, thank you for listening. Happy networking.