On 10/Mar/16 17:25, Jon Lewis wrote:

My guess is that GOOG is playing peering chicken with Cogent on "the IPv6 Internet" because doing so is low impact. Doing this with v4 routing would be far more painful to both GOOG and single-homed Cogent customers (probably make the news and make one or both look bad). Doing this with v6 keeps it off in the shadows...both parties know its an issue, but its likely not seriously impacting anyone yet. GOOG likely thinks they're big enough and their content desirable enough, that Cogent should peer with them. Cogent clearly disagrees. I'm sure GOOG would prefer SFI with Cogent for v4 and v6...but they're working on getting v6 first.

Assuming the IPv6 traffic is traversing the same physical ports as IPv4 between both networks, it is actually unnecessary pain to not pass IPv6 traffic across their interconnect relationship, unless removal of IPv6 peering lowers traffic utilization significantly to negate the need for Google to pay a higher rate to Cogent, and/or delay physical port speed upgrades. Mark.