What Net Neutrality should and should not cover

Mon Apr 28 04:17:07 UTC 2014

>Double-billing Rick. It's just that simple. Paid peering means you're deliberately
billing two customers for the same byte

I think this statement is a little short sighted if not a bit naive. What
both parties are sold is a pipe that carries data. A subscriber has one,
Netflix has one. They are different bandwidths, at different locations, and
have different costs.

Where your statement is short sighted I already explained partly in saying
its too difficult to decide who gets a free ride and who gets the bill so I
challenge you to propose an actual policy that prohibits charging for
peering that doesn't have major unintended consequences. All in all I am
sort of disappointed to find so few rational opinions around here. One of
the few decent articles I have read on it is here:
http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2014/02/media-botching-coverage-netflix-comcast-deal-getting-basics-wrong.html

I think if you make a law that says all content providers big and small get
free pipes and the residential subscribers of broadband must pay the tab
the cost of broadband in the US compared to the rest of the world
skyrocket.

I also think the practice of paying an intermediary ISP a per Mbps rate in
order to get to a last mile ISP over a settlement free agreement is also a
bit disingenuous in cases where the amount of traffic is sufficient enough
to fill multiple links. Theoretically there are many times where the
intermediary ISP can hand off the traffic to a last mile ISP in exactly the
same building they received it in so they have very few of the costs of
actually delivering the traffic yet are the only party receiving money from
the content provider for delivery. This arrangement makes sense when the
traffic to the last mile ISP is a percentage of one link but after enough
links are involved the intermediary ISP is serving no real other purpose
than as a loophole used to circumvent paid peering fees (right or wrong).

I think if paid peering were made illegal overnight for companies big or
small the landscape of the Internet would be completely redrawn and not for
the better. I honestly think what last mile ISP's should do in this
situation is to offer to provide transit for content delivery for a low
cost. They generally have available outbound capacity to other networks and
they can play the "settlement free only" card back at some of the companies
they are in dispute with. If nothing else it would result in having similar
traffic profiles and settlement free would start to make more sense so
everybody wins.

On Sun, Apr 27, 2014 at 1:56 PM, William Herrin <bill at herrin.us> wrote:

> On Sun, Apr 27, 2014 at 2:05 AM, Rick Astley <jnanog at gmail.com> wrote:
> > #3 On paid peering:
> > I think this is where people start to disagree but I don't see what
> should
> > be criminal about paid peering agreements. More specifically, I see
> serious
> > problems once you outlaw paid peering and then look at the potential
> > repercussions that would have.
>
> Double-billing Rick. It's just that simple. Paid peering means you're
> deliberately billing two customers for the same byte -- the peer and
> the downstream. And not merely incidental to ordinary service - the
> peer specifically connects to gain access to customers who already pay
> you and no one else. Where those two customers have divergent
> interests, you have to pick which one you'll serve even as you
> continue to bill both. That's a corrupt practice.
>
> What sort of corrupt practice? You might, for example, degrade your
> residential customers' speed to the part of the Internet housing a
> company you think should pay you for peering. Or permit the link to
> deteriorate while energetically upgrading others to keep pace with the
> times. Same difference.
>
> This doesn't have to be true. You could bill downstreams for
> consumption and exclude the paid peering from that calculation. But
> you don't do that. And you aren't planning to.
>
>
> > #4 On QoS (ie fast lane?):
> > In some of the articles I skimmed there was a lot of talk about fast lane
> > traffic but what this sounds like today would be known as QoS and
> > classification marking that would really only become a factor under
> > instances of congestion. The tech bloggers and journalists all seems to
> be
> > unanimously opposed to this but I admit I am sort of scratching my head
> at
> > the outrage over something that has been in prevalent use on many major
> > networks for several years.
>
> It's prevalent on private work networks and users hate it. It
> generally disables activities the network owners don't approve of
> while engaging in doubletalk about how they're OK with it. Users don't
> want to see this migrate outward.
>
> Regards,
> Bill Herrin
>
>
>
> --
> William D. Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
> 3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
> Falls Church, VA 22042-3004
>