On Mon, Oct 18, 2021 at 11:16 AM William Herrin <bill@herrin.us> wrote:

On Mon, Oct 18, 2021 at 10:30 AM Baldur Norddahl
<baldur.norddahl@gmail.com> wrote:
> Around here there are certain expectations if you sell a product called IP Transit and other expectations if you call the product paid peering. The latter is not providing the whole internet and is cheaper.

The problem with paid peering is that it creates a conflict of
interest which corruptly influences the company's behavior. Two
customers are paying you in full for a service but if one elects not
to pay you will also deny or degrade the service to the other one who
has, in fact, paid you.

The phrase "paying you in full" is the stumbling point with your

claim.

As Baldur noted, "paid peer [...] is not providing the whole

internet and is cheaper."

If the two customers are "paying you in full", then they're

paying you for transit, and as such, they get a copy of the

full tables, regardless of how you learn those routes,

whether through a paid relationship or a settlement free

relationship.

If the two customers are *not* paying full price, but are

instead paying the reduced price for "paid peering",

then they each recognize that the set of prefixes they

are receiving, and the spread of their prefixes in return

are inherently limited, *and will change over time as

the customer relationships on each side change."

Nobody buying "paid peering" expects the list of prefixes

sent and received across those sessions to remain constant

forever. That would imply no new customers are ever added,

and would imply no customers ever leave, which is clearly

unreasonable in the real world.

If you, as the customer paying for paid peering, see the

list of prefixes decreasing over time, when the contract

comes up for renewal, you are likely to argue for a lower

price, or may decide it's no longer worth it, and decide to

not renew the relationship.

On the other hand, if you, as the provider, are increasing

the number of prefixes being seen across those paid peerings

at a substantial rate, when the next renewal cycle comes up,

you may decide the price for paid peering should go up, because

you're providing more value across those sessions.

Each side evaluates the then-present set of prefixes being

exchanged when the contract comes up for renewal, to

decide if it's still worth it or not.

But if you're "paying in full" for IP transit, then the sessions

should include as much of the full BGP table as possible,

potentially including a default route, and the promise of that

session is to make your prefixes as visible to the entire rest

of the Internet as possible.

(This is, as a small aside, why I don't think Cogent should be

allowed to label their product "IP transit" so long as they are

willfully refusing to propagate their customer's prefixes to

*all* of the rest of the Internet. So long as they are choosing

to cherry-pick out certain networks that they will *not* propagate

their customers routes to, they are *not* providing true IP transit,

and should not label it as such.)

Regards,
Bill Herrin

Thanks!

Matt