akamai yesterday - what in the world was that

Fri Feb 14 09:46:10 UTC 2020

On Friday, 14 February, 2020 09:17, "Valdis Klētnieks" <valdis.kletnieks at vt.edu> said:

> After all - it's not like *they* are going to feel the pain of a single 106G
> upload,
> it's somebody else who feels the pain of 5 million downloads of a 106G image
> refresh.
> 
> Economists call this sort of thing an "externality".

I must admit, I'm blissfully unaware of CDN commercials, but I'd have expected that if I give a CDN my binary 100G binary blob and six people download it, I'd be billed a different amount to if six million people download it - and similarly if that blob is 1G vs 100G.

I guess I'm asking if there's an underlying problem with the model here, or if it's just the details of the numbers that are "wrong" in encouraging / discouraging certain behaviours.

Regards,
Tim.