On Sat, 22 Aug 1998, Mike Leber wrote:
Michael, I've met and talked with you several times and have the general impression you're a relatively creative guy.
*blushes*
I find it hard to believe that you are myopic to the extent of not being able to imagine these and other uses... unless the actual goal of your proposal is to have dialup providers and web crawlers get paid for existing.
Well, I can imagine them but I can also imagine solutions to them. For instance, rate-limiting can be applied on either side of the peering interface. And if both peers try to attract legitimate sucking users then chances are that both peers will get some of them and the traffic flows will even out somewhat. Also, if it does not make economic sense for peer A to have an interconnect with peer B in a specific city, then they won't do it. This greatly reduces the incentive for peer B to sign up customers to suck from A because all of a sudden, those customers will either lose connectivity or that traffic load will suddenly shift to peer C who sells transit to peer A. I think that most companies will think through these issues before acting rather than just taking the simplistic view that it is good to suck huge amounts of traffic from a peer. Also, this is an entirely hypothetical scenario so the actual implementation could differ considerably. Consider the fact that in order to make this work, both peers need to supply a settlement arbiter with a full city-to-city link map with route-miles and with a price list to determine the value of transit consumed. We could just as easily say that if the traffic is out of balance by a ratio of more than 2:1 then we will examine the transit consumed on both peer's networks based on the maps and the source/destination addresses. Then those numbers will be balanced against one another and the peer who uses more transit than they contribute will pay a settlement fee. Now it becomes a lot harder to sign up legitimate sucking customers that you know will create a settlement imbalance.
Ultimately, in all of these cases less efficient algorithms and uses will be chosen in the direction that results in positive revenue, and waste will occur.
I don't think that the future is as deterministic as you believe it would be. For instance, what if you sign up a webcrawler, and then once they have a good database, they host a search engine for multimedia content with thumbnail pictures, video and audio clips. All of a sudden they become a net sender of traffic. You can't control what your customers do with their net connections. -- Michael Dillon - Internet & ISP Consulting Memra Communications Inc. - E-mail: michael@memra.com Check the website for my Internet World articles - http://www.memra.com