On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 03:10:56PM -0800, Owen DeLong wrote:
On Jan 31, 2014, at 1:29 PM, Matt Palmer <mpalmer@hezmatt.org> wrote:
Imagine one of the big players saying, "we're going to charge you $X per route you send to us" (just like transit agreements that state, "we will charge you $X/GB of traffic"), or "your contract allows you to send us N routes" (just like, "your contract allows you to send us N Gb of traffic"). About 15 minutes later everyone else would start doing it, to recoup the costs of sending routes to that provider. Peering would be considered not only if the volume of traffic was mutually advantageous, but also if the routes exchanged were mutually advantageous.
That’s the optimistic outcome. The pessimistic outcome is that they get rapidly depeered by everyone unwilling to pay $X/GB and then start losing customers because their customers can no longer reach anyone else’s customers through them.
That doesn't mean someone somewhere wouldn't try it. But I doubt it would be done in such a heavy-handed manner as to incur that sort of reaction. There are a bunch of ways it could be done quietly and without too much fuss. Vague language about "reasonable route volume" would be the easiest to slip under the radar, and if the cost of additional routes is below what your costs of changing providers would be, you'll almost certainly just wear it. Similar language could also be a big stick against excessive deagg, so there's a potential upside there, too. The blow could very easily be softened, too, by offering to pay all your customer for the routes they accept *from* you -- even setting it up so it was revenue neutral (in the beginning, at least...) so people get used to the idea. Hell, I could see it pitched as an up-sell: pay us $$$ and we'll accept your /28, and pass some of that moolah along to others so they'll do it too. Once it's in place for that, just keep shortening the masklen over time for what you can announce for free (presumably as fragmentation due to sale of blocks increases route volume). If Mark Andrews' assertion comes to pass, that legal action is taken against those unwilling to accept longer prefixes, I'd expect this sort of scheme to come to pass *very* quickly. If you're willing to accept routes from all comers, just in exchange for payment to cover costs incurred, then nobody can claim restraint of trade or cartel-like behaviour. If things got really hairy, providers could use their netflow data and some BigData(TM) analytics to work out the "value" vs the "cost" of every route they were carrying, and drop those who didn't make the grade (where you could increase the "value" of your route by paying for it). If there's one thing the commercial Internet has demonstrated, is that there isn't a business model so weird that *someone* won't try it.
The reality probably lies somewhere in between. I suspect whoever chooses to conduct this little experiment first should be prepared for substantial pain.
There's no possible upside unless there's some risk. I'm surprised nobody's tried this already, the more I think about it. Time to raise some VC, perhaps! - Matt -- Of course, I made the mistake of showing [a demo application] off to my boss, who showed it off to his boss, and suddenly I couldn't reboot my desktop box without getting a change control approved. -- Derick Siddoway, in a place that doesn't exist