CDNs should pay eyeball networks, too.

Tue May 1 20:24:54 UTC 2012

On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 2:17 PM, Leo Bicknell <bicknell at ufp.org> wrote:
> In a message written on Tue, May 01, 2012 at 08:23:07PM +0200, Dominik Bay wrote:
>> "Feeding" via some bigger peer networks oder classic transit
>
> You have made the assumption that their choice is peering with your
> network or sending it out transit.  They may in fact peer with your
> upstream.
>
> That makes their choice peer with you, or peer with your upstream.
> Peering with your upstream may allow them to reach many people like
> you for cost of managing only a single peering session, as compared
> to maintaining a few dozen.
>
> Also, many networks have minimum volume amounts for peering
> relationships.  They may be able to get settlement free peering
> with your upstream by having some minimum traffic level that they
> would not have if they peer with some of the individual customers
> behind that upstream.  Peering with you may drop them below the
> threshold, causing them to pay for transit on 10's of Gigs of
> traffic.

Lets be honest. There are a million reasons we can all come up with to
try and justify something like this but 99% of the time it is just the
larger isp trying to throw their weight around in the name of greed.
In the end, the customers of both companies are the ones who suffer
and ultimately pay (figuratively and literally) for it.