On Sun, Apr 27, 2014 at 9:57 PM, Rick Astley <jnanog@gmail.com> wrote:
Here is a quote I made in the other thread around the same time you were sending this:
"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)."
But that scenario only applies where the content network has carried the traffic to the same building as the eyeball network, such that it really does just go from the content provider, into the cheapTransit router, and then right back out to the eyeball network. At that point, the content provider and eyeball network are paying roughly commensurate amounts for their infrastructure costs; the content provider to get the data to that common location, and the eyeball network to get it from that location back to the customers who requested it. I'm not sure why you think it's a loophole of any sort; if anything, it's an anti-loophole, as the most efficient answer would be for the content network and eyeball network to directly interconnect, having each hauled circuits to this point in common--but instead, due to policies, an intermediary is forced into the picture. And your understanding of transit seems to be tenuous at best. You say "are the only party receiving money from the content provider for delivery" as though it's a bad thing, or some unusual circumstance. This is exactly what transit is. I pay an upstream provider to carry my route advertisements and bits to the rest of the world, regardless of how near or far it is. You do the same thing as a broadband customer; you pay one provider for access, regardless of how many content providers you pull down content from. It sounds like you would advocate a model where every content source pays every eyeball network that requests its content, and every broadband subscriber pays to every network it requests content from, rather than the current model of paying one upstream transit provider for connectivity to the rest of the internet. Is that really the case? Is that really what you're advocating for?
I think we are in agreement that $EyeballNetwork's customers pay it for internet access and $ContentProvider should pay for their own pipes. But where we diverge is with $CheapTransitProvider.
OK, how about we substitute "NotSoCheapTransitProvider" into the equation. Now, does that make the situation any different in your eyes? Or do you still feel that fundamentally transit is only something that eyeball networks can pay for, that content networks must not pay a single upstream, but must instead pay every eyeball network separately, regardless of how inefficient and expensive that would be?
$CheapTransitProvider > $EyeballNetwork's because there is so much
At least for the purpose of traffic following the path of $ContentProvider traffic involved the only real purpose of the relationship with $CheapTransitProvider is a loophole to get around paying $EyeballNetwork. They are able to charge ridiculously low delivery prices because traffic is only on their network for just long enough to say it touched and should now be considered settlement free. It's little more than a cheap trick and it makes them sort of the Cash4Gold of the Internet. I can completely understand why $EyeballNetwork would tell $CheapTransitProvider they no longer choose to have a settlement free agreement and they must buy future ports.
And in that model, I think it would be entirely correct for the content provider to either deny access to their content for users of ExtortionistEyeballNetwork, or to charge them additional for access to the content, to offset the increased costs of paying for the ports to that network. After all, unlike your flawed traffic flow, it's not the content network pushing bits at the eyeball network; it's the eyeball network sucking the bits down from the content provider. If the eyeball network feels that volume of traffic is problematic for them, such that they can't afford to augment capacity, the clear answer is for the content providers to help out the poor, congested eyeball networks by reducing the bitrate of content so that those links won't be congested anymore. Serve up HD streams to networks that work cooperatively to augment capacity for their users; for networks that won't cover their share of the costs of augmenting, simply serve lower and lower bitrate streams to fit within the available link capacity, with a little banner across the top alerting the consumer that their experience is degraded due to their provider not adequately installing infrastructure to handle the consumer's requested traffic.