Inevitable death, was Re: Verizon Public Policy on Netflix

Tue Jul 15 04:21:44 UTC 2014

Mike:

An ASN is, literally, just a number. One that's used by a very 
awkward and primitive routing system that requires constant 
babysitting and tweaking and, after lo these many years, still 
doesn't deliver the security or robustness it should. Obtaining 
this token number (and a bunch of IP addresses which is no 
different, qualitatively, from what I already have) would be a 
large expense that would not produce any additional value for my 
customers but could force me to raise their fees -- something which 
I absolutely do not want to do.

Perhaps it's best to think of it this way: I'm outsourcing some 
backbone routing functions to my upstreams, which (generously) 
aren't charging me anything extra to do it. In my opinion, that's a 
good business move.

As for "peering:" the definition is pretty well established. ISPs 
do it; content providers at the edge do not.

Netflix is fighting a war of semantics and politics with ISPs. It 
is trying to cling to every least penny it receives and spend none 
of it on the resources it consumes or on making its delivery of 
content more efficient. We have been in conversations with it in 
which we've asked only for it to be equitable and pay us the same 
amount per customer as it pays other ISPs, such as Comcast (since, 
after all, they should be just as valuable to it). It has refused 
to do even that much. That's why talks have, for the moment, broken 
down and we are looking at other solutions.

--Brett Glass

At 09:58 PM 7/14/2014, Mike Lyon wrote:

>So we are splitting hairs with what "peering" means? And I am sure 
>Netflix (or any other content / network / CDN provider) would be 
>more than happy to statically route to you? Doubtful.
>
>Dude, put your big boy pants on, get an ASN, get some IP space, Â 
>I am a smaller ISP than you I am sure and I have both. It's not 
>rocket science. How are other networks suppose to take you 
>seriously if you don't have an ASN?
>
>-Mike