On Mon, 24 Aug 1998, John Curran wrote:
p.p.s. As noted, departure from shortest-exit is also another approach which may provide some answers to this situation, but that's a different topic which deserves its own thread. This message is simply noting that settling for peering traffic is quite viable, despite assertions to the contrary regarding traffic generation. As long as you're billing the senders on your network for increased usage (and handing it off shortest-exit), increased traffic is good thing.
Nothing you've said refutes the fact that transaction based settlements encourages waste. You've effectively pointed out that when properly billed it can be a pass through situation for the networks and only web hosting clients will suffer the brunt of the waste. The ability to generate waste in this system legitimately and non fraudulently is purely limited by your creativity. The use of smurfs as an example (non legitimate and fraudlent) is an easy to knock down straw man. A large of amount of legitimate and non fraudulent traffic, orders of magnitude larger than existing traffic flows, in any quantity desired, can be generated in either direction to achieve whatever revenue flow you want. This in effectively provides networks the open ended ability to extract cash from compeititors web hosting customers. In fact it could result in the situation where, for the same amount of actual sales online, it is more expensive to host at network A than network B because network B happens to have a large net index project that indexes content on everybody ELSES network. Don't like "net indexing"? Use any other suitable traffic generating application, there are plenty. Mike. +------------------- H U R R I C A N E - E L E C T R I C -------------------+ | Mike Leber Direct Internet Connections Voice 408 282 1540 | | Hurricane Electric Web Hosting & Co-location Fax 408 971 3340 | | mleber@he.net http://www.he.net | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+