I agree, but how do you decide who is hurt more?
And therefore who should be the vendor and who is the customer?
Is the "bigger" network always the vendor, or is the network with more content the vendor, or the network with more eyeballs the vendor? That's what I don't understand about the "balance" requirement. Ok, so you know the traffic is imbalanced, but whose fault/hurt is it when traffic is imbalanced? And who is responsible for "fixing" the imbalance in traffic?
In the telecommunications industry the role of "vendor" is played mutually depending on the initiation of the transaction. The finite start and stop point (or "call minute" as Geoff Huston referes to it) allows exchanging parties to assign cost for a specific transaction and a specific time. Since we have no such transaction basis in the Internet model, we are forced to rely on intangible metrics that can not be easily quantified. The examples are as old as "peering" itself; traffic levels, number of customers, operational impact, geographic reach, et cetera. The "peering" agreements derived from this criteria force certain parties into a virtual hierarchy. One who does not meet a specific set of intangible qualifications is not eligble for a particular arrangement that is deemed favorable, and is forced into a less favorable arrangement. Why did the majority of providers choose to adopt the settlement models of the few? Obviously they had to. What is surprising is that some parties who are obviously economically disadvantaged in such arrangements continue to fight for the model as a primary means of settlement. I say economically disadvantaged because it is often the case that in an equal trade, not all things are equal. When I look at the models in place around "peering" agreements today, I am forced to wonder who is the beneficiary in this transaction? Put in another light (and as the saying goes): If you are playing poker and can not identify the sucker, YOU are the sucker. One thing that is certain is that the current models make the benefits of more mature markets difficult to obtain. Hedging would be a primary example. Perhaps continued outages attributed to inequitable settlement arrangements will prompt greater focus on the "data transaction issue". Regards, James
The simple answer is I'm the vendor and you are the customer, so you should pay me.
The more difficult answer is one side turns off the connection (C&W) and the first side to blink is the customer (C&W). If C&W didn't feel any pain, why would they turn the peering sessions back on?