net neutrality and peering wars continue

Fri Jun 21 08:54:42 UTC 2013

On Jun 20, 2013, at 1:39 PM, Niels Bakker <niels=nanog at bakker.net> wrote:
> You're mistaken if you think that CDNs have equal number of packets going in and out.

I'm aware that neither the quantity nor the size of packets in each direction are equal.  I'm just hard-pressed to think of a reason why this matters, and so tend to hand-wave about it a bit…  To a rough approximation, flows are balanced.  Someone requests something, and an answer follows.  Requests tend to be small, but if someone requests something large, a large answer follows.  Conversely, people also send things, which are followed by small acknowledgements.  Again, this only matters if you place a great deal of importance both on the notion that size equals fairness, and that fairness is more important than efficiency.  I would argue that neither are true.  I'm far more interested in seeing the cost of Internet service go down, than seeing two providers saddled with equally high costs in the name of fairness.  And costs go down most quickly when each provider retains the full incentivization of its own ability to minimize costs.  Not when they have to worry about "fairness" in an arbitrary metric, relative to other providers.

The only occasion I can think of when traffic flows of symmetric volume have an economic benefit are when a third party is imposing excess rent on circuits, such that the cost of upgrading capacity is higher than the cost of "traffic engineering" flows to fill reverse paths.  And that's hardly the sort of mental pretzels I want carriers to be having to worry about, instead of moving bits to 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.

I agree completely that that's the problem.  But it didn't appear to be what Benson was talking about.

                                -Bill