net neutrality and peering wars continue

Thu Jun 20 20:39:56 UTC 2013

* woody at pch.net (Bill Woodcock) [Thu 20 Jun 2013, 16:59 CEST]:
>On Jun 20, 2013, at 5:37 AM, Benson Schliesser <bensons at queuefull.net> wrote:

>>Right. By "sending peer" I meant the network transmitting a 
>>packet, unidirectional flow, or other aggregate of traffic into 
>>another network. I'm not assuming anything about whether they are 
>>offering "content" or something else - I think it would be better 
>>to talk about peering fairness at the network layer, rather than 
>>the business / service layer.
>In that case, it's essentially never an issue, since essentially 
>every packet in one direction is balanced by a packet in the other 
>direction, so rotational symmetry takes care of the "fairness."

You're mistaken if you think that CDNs have equal number of packets 
going in and out.

>I think you may be taking your argument too far, though, since by 
>this logic, the sending and receiving networks also have control 
>over what they choose to transit and receive, and I think that 
>discounts too far the reality that it is in fact the _customers_ 
>that are making all of these decisions, and the networks are, in the 
>aggregate, inflexible in their need to service customers.  What a 
>customer will pay to do, a service provider will take money to 
>perform.  It's not really service providers (in aggregate) making 
>these decisions.  It's customers.

I think the point is here that networks are nudging these decisions by 
making certain services suck more than others by way of preferential 
network access.

	-- Niels.