In a message written on Fri, Dec 03, 2010 at 11:39:32AM -0500, Christopher Morrow wrote:
right, that was the point(s) I was trying to make... sadly I didn't make them I guess.
Well, I wasn't 100% sure, so best to confirm. But it all goes to the heart of Network Neutrality. It's easy to set up the extreme straw men on both sides: - If Netflix had a single data center in Seattle it is unreasonable for them to expect Comcast to settlment free peer with them and then haul the traffic to every local market. - If Netflix pays Akamai (or similar) to place the content in all local markets saving Comcast all of the backbone costs it is unreasonable for Comcast to then charge them. The question is, what in the middle of those two is fair? That seems to be what the FCC is trying to figure out. It's an extremely hard question, I've pondered many business and technical ideas proposed by a lot of great thinkers, and all of them have significant problems. At a high level, I think peering needs to evolve in two very important ways: - Ratio needs to be dropped from all peering policies. It made sense back when the traffic was two people e-mailing each other. It was a measure of "equal value". However the net has evolved. In the face of streaming audio and video, or rich multimedia web sites Content->User will always be wildly out of ratio. It has moved from a useful measure, to an excuse to make Content pay in all circumstances. - Peering policies need to look closer at where traffic is being dropped off. Hot potato was never a good idea, it placed the burden on the receiver and "propped up" ratio as a valid excuse. We need more cold potato routing, more peering only with regional ASN's/routes. Those connecting to the eyeball networks have a responbility to get the content at least in the same general areas as the end user, and not drop it off across the country. If large ISP's really wanted to get the FCC off their back they would look at writing 21st century peering policies, rather than trying to keep shoehoring 20th century ones into working with a 21st century traffic profile. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/