On Tue, Mar 16, 2021 at 3:33 AM Douglas Fischer <fischerdouglas@gmail.com> wrote:
There is no specific story on the focus. My objective is to go a bit beyond the technical aspects of Peering, or De-peering.
At the first moment, I don't mention some cases that I have in mind, exactly to avoid the polemic and focus on the aspects around the cases.
I will give a hypothetic example, with no real names:
--- The "SteveAndEdNet", a CDN Company, decides to extend its branchs until "Kingdom of Far Far Away", and creates a POP there. Installs itself on "DorisInnDatacenter", connects with some IXPs over there, connects some PNIs with some nobles. But, after some time, "SteveAndEdNet" make a deal with "RumpelstiltkinNet" a Transit provider that operates there.
On that deal "RumpelstiltkinNet" ensure to supply the traffic demanded to "SteveAndEdNet" POP to be considered technical justifiable... But it also demands, that "SteveAndEdNet" drain all the traffic to IXPs and PNIs... With that, "RumpelstiltkinNet" can be the only one reseller of the content delivered by "SteveAndEdNet". --- This is a foggy example that I'm trying to understand better by the point of view of Economics Dumping.
And then?? Can this be considered an anti-competitive act?
If anyone feels more comfortable reaching me privately, no issues with that.
From the content-provider side, such demands (ie, drain all traffic away from IXPs and other SFI PNIs) might last a short time, if RSN (RumpleStiltskinNet) undercuts the pricing so low on their connectivity
Hi Douglas, I've been involved in negotiations with country-level providers that engaged in negotiation tactics like that. that it makes sense to move all the traffic over, or bundles in other products (power, space, remote management, etc.) so that the overall package price is lower than it would be if the IXP and SFI PNIs were maintained. However, such relationships tend to fall apart the first time RSN has a large-scale outage that negatively impacts the CDN and all its content customers, at which point the negotiation table is usually re-opened, and the CDN says "in order to protect our customers from your ineptitude, we require alternate pathways for the content to be served in your region" -- and the exclusive arrangement goes away. The simple fact of the matter is that in general, agreeing to single-home your content behind a single provider results in reduced availability for the content, as a single provider has less redundancy and less diversity than a blend of multiple providers, whether paid or settlement free. And once a major outage happens that threatens the top-line revenue numbers for the CDN, saving money on the bottom line suddenly becomes much less important than preserving the top-line revenue number. There's a finite and limited benefit RSN can offer by reducing cost numbers; but there's a potentially *unlimited* upside risk. That is, RSN can't reduce your cost numbers from what they are today to less than zero; so there's a maximum benefit they can offer. But if they have a bad week, and you go dark, and lose all your customers, you could lose all your revenue--and there's no limit on how much you could lose on that end, as your customer base and revenue numbers go up. Thus, on balance, such agreements don't last, as either the CDN goes out of business, and the agreement thus ends, or the CDN becomes more successful, and the top-line revenue dollar value risk outweighs the offered cost-reduction saving benefit RSN is bringing to the table, and the agreement is thus terminated. I hope this helps clear up the situation for you. :) Thanks! Matt