Isn't this a problem with legacy peering agreements in today's internet? The same thing happened between Netflix, Level3, and Verizon a few years ago. The legacy concept of settlement-free peering is based on traffic forwarding parity. If what I forward to you roughly matches what you forward to me, we can agree that we have no reason to charge each other for access. The concept works fine when content and eyeballs are evenly distributed between providers. This doesn't work in today's divergent content and eyeball networks.

If Netflix agreed to settlement-free peering under the legacy definition, then as far as the letter of the law goes, Netflix is in the wrong.

SK's in kind of a pickle when it comes to peering regulation, but it looks like they need 1:1.8 for settlment-free peering.
https://35v.peeringasia.com/files/Internet.Regulation.in.Korea.pdf

ATT Peering Policy
https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/6518398337.pdf
Peer must maintain a balanced traffic ratio between its network and AS7018. In particular:
- No more than 2.0:1.0 ratio of traffic flowing in either direction, on average
- Balanced time of day traffic distribution currently as measured by peak to average traffic levels

Verizon Peering Policy
https://www.verizon.com/business/terms/peering/
Traffic Exchange Ratio. The ratio of the aggregate amount of traffic exchanged between the Requester and the Verizon Business Internet Network with which it seeks to interconnect shall be roughly balanced and shall not exceed 1.8:1.

Lumen Peering Policy
https://www.lumen.com/en-us/about/legal/peering-policy.html
The backbone cost burden associated with settlement-free peering traffic exchange should be equitably shared. Regardless of the direction or type of traffic exchanged between the networks, the routing practices and location of interconnection points should be such that each party bears a reasonably equal share of backbone costs.




On Mon, Oct 11, 2021 at 9:27 PM Owen DeLong via NANOG <nanog@nanog.org> wrote:


On Oct 11, 2021, at 13:57 , Matthew Walster <matthew@walster.org> wrote:



On Mon, 11 Oct 2021 at 21:05, Matthew Petach <mpetach@netflight.com> wrote:
I think it would be absolutely *stunning* for content providers 
to turn the model on its head; use a bittorrent like model for 
caching and serving content out of subscribers homes at 
recalcitrant ISPs, so that data doesn't come from outside, 
it comes out of the mesh within the eyeball network, with 
no clear place for the ISP to stick a $$$ bill to.

Ignoring for the moment that P2P is inherently difficult to stream with (you're usually downloading chunks in parallel, and with devices like Smart TVs etc you don't really have the storage to do so anyway) there's also the problem that things like BitTorrent don't know network topology and therefore only really increases the cross-sectional bandwidth required.

A 4K 2 hour movie is about 40GB. Most modern smart TVs around 32GB of RAM and can probably devote about 20GB of that to buffering a stream, so yeah, that should actually be doable.

While torrent-like distribution isn’t particularly good for the eyeball provider, it can be good for getting content to eyeballs under some circumstances regardless of how bad it is for said network.

Unfortunately, it’s not good at knowing how bad it’s being for the network and it’s also not good at detecting the circumstances when it’s good for the end user or not.

Not to mention that it has been tried before, and didn't work then either.

Yep.

Owen