Double-billing Rick. It's just that simple. Paid peering means you're deliberately billing two customers for the same byte
I think this statement is a little short sighted if not a bit naive. What both parties are sold is a pipe that carries data. A subscriber has one, Netflix has one. They are different bandwidths, at different locations, and have different costs. Where your statement is short sighted I already explained partly in saying its too difficult to decide who gets a free ride and who gets the bill so I challenge you to propose an actual policy that prohibits charging for peering that doesn't have major unintended consequences. All in all I am sort of disappointed to find so few rational opinions around here. One of the few decent articles I have read on it is here: http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2014/02/media-botching-coverage-netflix-comca... I think if you make a law that says all content providers big and small get free pipes and the residential subscribers of broadband must pay the tab the cost of broadband in the US compared to the rest of the world skyrocket. I also think the practice of paying an intermediary ISP a per Mbps rate in order to get to a last mile ISP over a settlement free agreement is also a bit disingenuous in cases where the amount of traffic is sufficient enough to fill multiple links. Theoretically there are many times where the intermediary ISP can hand off the traffic to a last mile ISP in exactly the same building they received it in so they have very few of the costs of actually delivering the traffic yet are the only party receiving money from the content provider for delivery. This arrangement makes sense when the traffic to the last mile ISP is a percentage of one link but after enough links are involved the intermediary ISP is serving no real other purpose than as a loophole used to circumvent paid peering fees (right or wrong). I think if paid peering were made illegal overnight for companies big or small the landscape of the Internet would be completely redrawn and not for the better. I honestly think what last mile ISP's should do in this situation is to offer to provide transit for content delivery for a low cost. They generally have available outbound capacity to other networks and they can play the "settlement free only" card back at some of the companies they are in dispute with. If nothing else it would result in having similar traffic profiles and settlement free would start to make more sense so everybody wins. On Sun, Apr 27, 2014 at 1:56 PM, William Herrin <bill@herrin.us> wrote:
On Sun, Apr 27, 2014 at 2:05 AM, Rick Astley <jnanog@gmail.com> wrote:
#3 On paid peering: I think this is where people start to disagree but I don't see what should be criminal about paid peering agreements. More specifically, I see serious problems once you outlaw paid peering and then look at the potential repercussions that would have.
Double-billing Rick. It's just that simple. Paid peering means you're deliberately billing two customers for the same byte -- the peer and the downstream. And not merely incidental to ordinary service - the peer specifically connects to gain access to customers who already pay you and no one else. Where those two customers have divergent interests, you have to pick which one you'll serve even as you continue to bill both. That's a corrupt practice.
What sort of corrupt practice? You might, for example, degrade your residential customers' speed to the part of the Internet housing a company you think should pay you for peering. Or permit the link to deteriorate while energetically upgrading others to keep pace with the times. Same difference.
This doesn't have to be true. You could bill downstreams for consumption and exclude the paid peering from that calculation. But you don't do that. And you aren't planning to.
#4 On QoS (ie fast lane?): In some of the articles I skimmed there was a lot of talk about fast lane traffic but what this sounds like today would be known as QoS and classification marking that would really only become a factor under instances of congestion. The tech bloggers and journalists all seems to be unanimously opposed to this but I admit I am sort of scratching my head at the outrage over something that has been in prevalent use on many major networks for several years.
It's prevalent on private work networks and users hate it. It generally disables activities the network owners don't approve of while engaging in doubletalk about how they're OK with it. Users don't want to see this migrate outward.
Regards, Bill Herrin
-- William D. Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us 3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/> Falls Church, VA 22042-3004