What's really needed is a routing slot market

Sun Feb 6 21:29:02 UTC 2011

>
>
> 1) You get a note from the owner of jidaw.com, a large ISP in Nigeria,
> telling you that they have two defaultless routers so they'd like a
> share of the route fees.  Due to the well known fraud problem in
> Nigeria, please pay them into the company's account in the Channel
> Islands.  What do you do?  (Helpful hint: there are plenty of
> legitimate reasons for non-residents to have accounts in the Channel
> Islands.  I have a few.)
>
>
If I peer with them or sell them transit or buy transit from them then we
have a reason to talk, otherwise, not so much.

> 2) Google says here's our routes, we won't be paying anything.  What
> do you do?
>
>
There's a cost to taking the routes from Google, and a benefit to having
those routes.  As long as the benefit exceeds the cost, no worries.

> 2a) If you insist no pay, no route, what do you tell your users when
> they call and complain?
>
> 2b) If you make a special case for Google, what do you do when Yahoo,
> AOL, and Baidu do the same thing?
>
> Back to the cost/benefit balance above.

> I can imagine some technical backpressure, particularly against networks
> that don't aggregate their routes, but money?  Forget about it, unless
> perhaps you want to mix them into the peering/transit negotiations.
>
>
I think the only way it works, presuming anyone wanted to do it, is as a
property of transit and peering.

If I buy transit from you and want to send you a mess of routes, you might
charge me more for my transit on account of that.
Perhaps I get one free prefix announcement per x amount of bandwidth I am
buying ?

If we are peering then prefix balance might join traffic balance as a way to
think about whether the arrangement is good for both peers.

All of these arrangements occur between directly peering or transit
providing neighbors.  If I buy transit from you, I expect you to pay any
costs needed to get my routes out to the world (and probably to charge me
accordingly).