net neutrality and peering wars continue

Thu Jun 20 00:26:56 UTC 2013

Hi Wayne,

Another important point not to be missed is that these days, thanks to CDN technology,  a heavy inbound ratio does not necessarily indicate a high cost burden like it did pre-CDN tech.  Even more ironically, the unwillingness of a peer to upgrade connections due to the ratio excuse results in the CDN having to source traffic from non-optimal locations just to get the bits into the other network, thereby increasing the cost burden of the broadband network.

If it were true that these issues were only about cost there would be plenty of common ground to negotiate acceptable peering terms, don't you think?

Dave

-----Original Message-----
From: Wayne E Bouchard [mailto:web at typo.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, June 19, 2013 6:03 PM
To: Dorian Kim
Cc: North American Network Operators' Group
Subject: Re: net neutrality and peering wars continue

On Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 07:44:15PM -0400, Dorian Kim wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 06:39:48PM -0500, Leo Bicknell wrote:
> > 
> > On Jun 19, 2013, at 6:03 PM, Randy Bush <randy at psg.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > as someone who does not really buy the balanced traffic story, 
> > > some are eyeballs and some are eye candy and that's just life, 
> > > seems like a lot of words to justify various attempts at control, higgenbottom's point.
> > 
> > I agree with Randy, but will go one further.
> > 
> > Requiring a balanced ratio is extremely bad business because it incentivizes your competitors to compete in your home market.
> > 
> > You're a content provider who can't meet ratio requirements?  You go into the eyeball space, perhaps by purchasing an eyeball provider, or creating one.
> > 
> > Google Fiber, anyone?
> > 
> > Having a requirement that's basically "you must compete with me on all the products I sell" is a really dumb peering policy, but that's how the big guys use ratio.
> 
> At the end of the day though, this comes down to a clash of business 
> models and the reason why it's a public spectacle, and of public 
> policy interest is due to the wide spread legacy of monopoly driven 
> public investment in the last mile infrastructure.
> 
> -dorian

At the risk of inflaming passions, I'll share my opinion on this whole topic and then disappear back into my cubicle.

For my part, peering ratios never made sense anyway except in the pure transit world. I mean, content providers are being punished by eyeball networks because the traffic is one way. Well, DUH! But everyone overlooks two simple facts: 1) Web pages don't generate traffic, users do. Content sits there taking up disk space until a user comes to grab it. (Not quite the case with data miners such as Google, but you get the idea.) 2) Users would not generate traffic unless there were content they want to access. Whether that is web pages, commerce pages such as Amazon or ebay, streams, or peer-to-peer game traffic, if there's nothing interesting, there's nothing happening. So both sides have an equal claim to "it's all your fault" and one seeking to punish the other is completely moronic.

Traffic interchange is good. Period. It puts the users closer to the content and the content closer to the user and everyone wins. So I never once understood why everyone was all fired up about ratios. It just never made any sense to me from the get-go. To have government get into this will certainly not help the problem, it will just make it a hundred times worse. Remember the old saying that the eight most terrifying words in the English language are, "I'm from the government. I'm here to help." and boy will they try to "help". You'll be lucky if you as a company can keep still your doors open after they get done "helping" you.

Anyhow, just my two bits.

-Wayne

---
Wayne Bouchard
web at typo.org
Network Dude
http://www.typo.org/~web/