Verio Decides what parts of the internet to drop

Sat Dec 4 21:37:06 UTC 1999

| Great idea, but charges should apply to _peers_, not customers.

Peers and customers are currently indistinguishable.

A peer is simply a customer who receives limited connectivity,
usually constrained by BGP announcement filtering in both directions,
for a heavy discount, sometimes as much as 100% off normal pricing.

A supplier, on the other hand, is someone who sends you a bill,
even if that bill is hugely discounted, with the expectation that if
it is not paid, the connectivity offered as a service will be terminated.

This taxonomy is convenient in that it leaves one with a small
grey area wherein neither party sends the other a bill, and neither
party has the right to demand that service continues for a particular
amount of time.

| Charging customers for announces prefixes merely creates an incentive
| for backbone operators to announce more routes and, correspondingly,
| collect more money.

If network X is sending network Y too-long prefixes, or too many prefixes,
network X may choose to filter them, or require that they be aggregated.
A customer paying a larger amount of money is likelier to have this
demand met than a customer with a very steep discount.   A supplier,
on the other hand, may choose to increase the bill when faced with
a customer who sends inappropriate prefixes.   In the grey area, who knows?
So far the only answers there have been inbound filtering and proxy
aggregation.

	Sean.