"William Allen Simpson" <wsimpson@greendragon.com> writes:

In view of the difference, I would suggest that the web farms have a case that UUnet should pay _them_ for the priveledge of accessing their content! Anytime UUnet asks for a fee for peering, just tell them that you really consider them unequal, and that they should pay YOU!

This would be a really good idea because it would give a strong push into investing in web caching technologies at the ISP level. Once that's been done, and access-level devices (customer-aggregating NATs and the like) can be gotten reliably to intercept queries directed towards anything other than a web caching hierarchy, in an intelligent engineering effort to keep traffic as local as possible when it's possible, the whole spurious argument that this is about web farms will go away. Moreover, a more general piecemeal settlements scheme would be much easier to put in place in an environment where the web farmers or small providers argue back that they ought to be paid by larger providers with huge numbers of end users connected through them. Finally, if you were UUNET and looking at things from a UUNET perspective, what's the difference between an entity exchanging traffic with them in one or two places across an FDDI switch and an entity exchanging traffic with them in one or two places across a Frame Relay switch? And wouldn't you start wondering when small providers will start paying their own customers for the privilege of talking with them? Sean.