While I do not disagree that larger providers looking to protect their revenues is an economically-sound objective, I think the typical peering policies of old do not entirely hold up in 2016.
I’m pretty convinced that they never really did. I realize they’ve been popular conventional wisdom for some time now, but that was brought about when Telcos started being the dominant players in the ISP market and I always regarded it as an artifact of “carrier mentality” where they were so used to the settlement mechanisms of the traditional telephone network. The reality is that the traditional telephone network has been getting slowly superseded by the internet largely because of the differences in the settlement model. If TDM and its settlement model were cheaper than VOIP, there would be little reason to spend money deploying VOIP. Unified communications has some benefits, but not really enough in most real world implementations to overcome the costs if it wasn’t reducing the corporate phone-spend. For many years, telcos tried all kinds of strange things and in some remote regions these are still happening. For example in some places, they sought regulatory protection of their “right to revenue” for voice calls by actually getting laws against VOIP services and the like. Those laws still exist in some areas and their economies are suffering for it. Bottom line, I’ve never seen a case where any ISP has definitively benefited from a restrictive peering policy. At best, it’s a neutral factor that most people just sort of accept. Routinely, it drives business away from such ISPs towards Tier-2s with good transit relationships and a better peering policy. At worst, I’ve seen it create active bad will in various communities as is the current case with Cogent and is a demonstrable factor in the decline of SPRINT. Owen