Or, let's say A finds artificial ways to send more traffic to B to balance it out so they get charged less. Hmmm... I don't see any way changing the charging model addresses that.

I think that if both the source of the traffic and the destination, i.e. the sender and receiver, have to pay for the traffic they get and receive, that it is much more difficult to come up with schemes to 'even out' the flow.. Continued below.

I don't think that good content should have to succumb to advertising littering it's pages in order to support itself. I don't think that ftp.cs.berkeley.edu should have to install ADs in the readme files so that you see an ad everytime you go to download sendmail, as an example. Get real.

Advertising is just one way the content provider can generate money. If it is content that someone wants, shouldn't they pay for it? If the business model changes so that traffic starts to cost something to the users at both ends, per usage rather than flat rate, someone has to pay. If that content provider is idealogically opposed to advertsing, then they better fnid someway to pay.

In fact, it's easier to generate what you want to a host that doesn't respond. No need to worry about the responses counteracting your intent. I'm not sure how you would distinguish fraudulent traffic to enforce such a provision. Afterall, it could look like a port scanner, or any number of other things.

Hmm. I think that if network A continuously generates traffic to a host on network B that doesn't exist, this would be easy to catch. For instance, Cisco's netflow shows traffic flow to and from source and destination. If its all one way, then it is invalid traffic. I see that there are issues with this, especially with today's tools, but I don't think it is impossible to catch fraudulent traffic. I would also say that there is no need for settelements until you reach some scale of difference. Whether that is an order of magnitude, or some smaller scale, doesn't matter to much. But when you do this, I think it quickly becomes obvious when you start to get enough invalid traffic to pass that threshhold...

...

Thus, there will most likely have to be, at a minimum, an Independent Peering Council, or at worst, government regulation, to make this happen. :-(

The worst would be if this did happen. The proposal has _WAY_ too many holes and sounds like exactly the kind of proposal that is why we all dread regulation so much.

I agree that noone wants regulation, but I don't see an Independent Peering Group, or a group that has board members from many ISP's as a bad thing. I don't know if such a group could ever come to an agreement, but that is another story. As for the holes, you listed a couple. That people can generate fraudulent traffic and it isn't easy to catch was one -- I think if it isn't easy today, it will be soon, especially if you need it to survive as an ISP. And the other I saw was that advertising shouldn't be needed to generate the $$ the content provider needs to pay usage based charges vs. flat-rate. All I can say is there are other means to generate money, and the content providers will do so if they have to to stay on-line. Again, not advocating this is the way to go, nor expressing the views of my employer... Sean ___________________________________ Sean Butler, CCIE #3897 IBM Global Services -- OpenNet Support Phone: 8-631-9809, 813-523-7353 Fax: 8-427-5475 813-878-5475 Internet email: sebutler@us.ibm.com