Generation of traffic in "settled" peering arrangement

Mon Aug 24 22:15:26 UTC 1998

On Mon, 24 Aug 1998, John Curran wrote:

> At 01:49 PM 08/24/1998 -0700, Patrick Greenwell wrote:
> >Are you saying that someone should be forced to pay for the privilege of 
> >offering something for free to your customers? Things that your customers,
> >who I number among are requesting?
> 
> There's no way to know what is being offered "for free", "in 
> exchange for ads", "due to a credit card transaction", etc.  

Actually, since we were discussing sites such as sunsite, I think that we
at least have an idea. If we go to a settlement-based model, one can only
wonder what will happen to freeware/shareware sites. 

> It's all just traffic.

Sure it is. Traffic that the *receiver* is requesting. 

> Customers who receive traffic currently bear some of the costs
> and the sending customer bears some of the costs.  In the case
> of an off-net sender with shortest-exit routing and no offsetting
> traffic in the other direction, the receiving customer ends up 
> bearing all of the costs.  

Well, my understanding is (and someone correct me if I am wrong) in at
least the case of Exodus, they aren't using closest-exit. I can completely
understand requiring peers not use closest-exit. That seems somewhat
reasonable. But it is still the receiver that is initiating the
transfer in these cases and "causing" the asymmetry. And the receiver,
someone like me, is paying for a bidirectional link to BBN already. I'm
already paying to receive the data, yet what you are proposing to do has
the sender paying as well. 

I haven't seen anything in these recent discussions to suggest that BBN
would be offering me a discount on inbound traffic since now the sender
would be paying for it.  

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