CDNs should pay eyeball networks, too.

Tue May 1 17:26:07 UTC 2012

On 5/1/12, Dominik Bay <db at rrbone.net> wrote:
> Yesterday I received the following mail, from a CDN:
>
> ---->8----
> Greetings,
>
> Limelight Networks [has] recently updated our requirements for
> settlement-free peering
>
> This letter is to notify you that yyy no longer meets our minimum
> requirements.

Proposed solution:

Greetings,

Where settlement-free peering has been offered but rejected, YYY moves
all data traffic transiting that AS through a single minimum-cost
Internet connection (cough Cogent cough) with the attendant impact to
reliability. We appreciate the notice of depeering and will endeavor
to identify and advise those making paid use of our respective
services as to the impending impact to their activities.

On the technical side you can only easily enforce that for outbound
traffic. Essentially filter the routes containing their AS except from
your minimum cost link. Intentionally degraded service can be better
than flat refusal. Communication is two-way so even though the CDN
sends more than it receives this is still a credible threat. Your
customer sees perfectly good connectivity everywhere else and it isn't
a complete disconnect so your customer assumes its "their" Internet
connection rather than his.

> I totally understand that some companies might not be able to handle
> sub-5Mbps peering sessions, be it technical or organisational, but >=100Mbps
> should be worth any effort, as long as it improves the network.

If I'm willing to go to your location, buy the card for your router
and pay you for the staff hours to set it up, there should be *no*
situation in which I'm willing to accept your traffic from an upstream
Internet link but am unwilling to engage in otherwise settlement-free
peering with you.

Your customers have paid you to connect to me and my customers have
paid me to connect to you. Double-billing the activity by either of us
collecting money from the other is just plain wrong.

Regards,
Bill Herrin

-- 
William D. Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
Falls Church, VA 22042-3004