CDNs should pay eyeball networks, too.

Tue May 1 20:39:02 UTC 2012

On Tue, May 01, 2012 at 02:43:50PM -0400, William Herrin wrote:
> On 5/1/12, Patrick W. Gilmore <patrick at ianai.net> wrote:
> > On May 1, 2012, at 13:26 , William Herrin wrote:
> >> 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.
> >
> > I disagree with this.  In fact, I can think of several possible cases where
> > this would not hold, both using pure business and pure technical
> > justifications.
> 
> Hi Patrick,
> 
> Please educate me. I'd be happy to adopt a more nuanced view.
> 
> 
> >> 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.
> >
> > Wrong?  My rule is: Your network, your decision.
> 
> Yes, wrong. Some decisions fall in to areas covered by general ethics.

You are high. If I've entered into contracts with multiple parties to
deliver their traffic, there is no 'double dipping' or 'double billing'.
Ignore any sort of traffic *type*. To assert that some transit entity 
with two customers paying to reach the universe (happens to include each
party reciprocally) should go out of their way to discount for such 
customer to customer traffic is both madness of bellhead-accounting
level and a quick route to bankruptcy. Stupid and nothing YOU would
certainly do for your customers...?

> You sell a customer a red ball when you know you can only deliver
> green balls, it's a lie. Unethical. Wrong.

Utterly irrelevant to the discussion.

> You work for a company (W2 salary) and in the course of your work
> contract something to another company where you're an officer it's a
> conflict of interest. Unethical. Wrong.

Utterly irrelevant to the discussion.

> A customer pays you to build a piece of software by the hour. Another
> comes along and asks for the same software. You bill both for each
> hour. Double billing. Unethical. Wrong.

Utterly irrelevant to the discussion.

> A customer pays you to deliver a packet to "the Internet." You talk to
> the packet's destination and say, "Hey, I'll deliver it to you
> directly but only if you pay me. Otherwise I'll just toss it out in a
> random direction and hope it gets there." Double billing. Unethical.
> Wrong.

Mindset of an inexperienced small provider who believes "the Internet" 
is something 'out there' and your infrastructure isn't part of it. Your 
customers give you traffic at your handoff to deliver to/from others. 
Some of those others amy also be your customers; are you giving them 
free traffic customer-to-customer [complex accounting at your egress 
to peers and transit] or are you billing them for traffic transferred 
[port stats facing the customer]?

Discussion of applicability of one model or another to this or that type
of business is an interesting academic exercise, but if you aren't willing
to give your customers free transit across your service to each other, your
position is at best disingenuous. At worst, hypocritical.

Cheers!

Joe

-- 
         RSUC / GweepNet / Spunk / FnB / Usenix / SAGE / NewNOG