Governance
Proposed — open for inputNeutral by construction, not by promise.
Everything on this page is a proposal. It describes the structure we intend to put to the founding members, and the questions we expect them to reopen. Nothing here is ratified.
1. Founding charter and mission
The charter should establish the federation as a member-led body whose purpose is to operate a neutral peering exchange and to develop open interoperability and identity standards for its members’ benefit.
It should state plainly what the federation is not: not a wholesale carrier, not a least-cost routing product, and not a body that can grant any member relief from its own regulatory obligations.
- Purpose, scope, and explicit non-goals.
- The relationship between the federation and any commercial operator of the network.
- Asset and directory ownership, and what happens to member data if the federation winds down.
- Amendment procedure — including which clauses require a supermajority.
2. Membership eligibility and technical certification
Membership should be open to any provider that can meet the technical and conduct requirements, and denied on stated grounds rather than at the discretion of incumbents.
Eligibility
An operating communications provider serving its own customers, able to identify itself and stand behind the destinations it registers.
Certification
A defined test process covering interconnect setup, authentication, signalling conformance, media handling, and directory registration before a member carries live traffic.
Ongoing standing
Continued membership depends on maintaining certification, meeting the conduct rules, and responding to abuse reports within the agreed window.
3. Traffic eligibility, fair use, and abuse response
| Area | Proposed rule |
|---|---|
| Eligible traffic | Sessions to destinations a member has registered and agreed to receive. General PSTN fallback termination is out of scope, permanently — not just during the pilot. |
| Fair use | Members carry traffic that reflects their own customers’ ordinary activity. Transiting third-party traffic into the federation without disclosure is a breach. |
| Abuse response | A defined report channel, an acknowledgement window, and a member obligation to investigate traffic attributed to its own customers. |
| Enforcement | Graduated: notice, then rate limiting or suspension of specific traffic, then suspension of the interconnect. Each step reviewable by the member body. |
| Responsibility | Each provider remains responsible for its own customers and its own legal and regulatory obligations. Membership changes none of that. |
4. Identity authority, call signing, and auditability
Routing and identity claims are only useful if someone is accountable for them.
Attributable claims
Every session crossing the federation is attributable to an originating member. Claims that cannot be traced to a responsible member are not acted on.
Signing policy
How members sign and validate calls, how the federation treats signed and unsigned sessions, and how that policy relates to each member’s existing national obligations.
Directory authority
Who may register a destination, what evidence supports the registration, and how a competing claim is resolved.
Audit
Retention of routing and policy decisions sufficient for a member to reconstruct what happened to a specific session, with defined access rules.
5. Member voting, rule changes, and disputes
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One member, one vote
Proposed as the default, so that governance weight does not track traffic volume. Founding members will decide whether that survives contact with a much larger cohort.
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Rule changes are proposed in the open
Drafts circulate on the working-group list with a comment period before any vote. Emergency operational measures are time-limited and require ratification afterwards.
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Disputes escalate through defined stages
Direct resolution between members, then mediation by an impartial panel drawn from uninvolved members, then a binding decision under the charter’s dispute procedure.
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Enforcement decisions are reviewable
A member suspended by operational action can require review by the member body, so operational authority does not become unaccountable authority.
Open governance questions
We would rather publish these than pretend they are settled.
- Governance posture. Whether the federation is a company-operated service, a cooperative owned by its members, or a standards initiative with a separate commercial operator. Each has different implications for neutrality, and this decision needs to be made with the founding cohort, not announced to it.
- Cost recovery. How the network’s operating costs are shared, and how to structure that without recreating volume-based influence.
- Pilot geography. Which jurisdictions the pilot operates in, which determines member eligibility and what can responsibly be said about regulatory treatment.
- Large-member concentration. What prevents a small number of large members from setting rules that suit only them, once the cohort grows past the founding group.
Founding members shape all of this. The point of recruiting a small first cohort is that these decisions get made by providers who will have to live with them.
Have an argument with this page.
That is what it is for. Founding members get a seat in the charter discussion; the mailing list carries drafts and requests for comment to anyone with a substantive interest.