Cogent - Google - HE Fun

Thu Mar 10 16:14:43 UTC 2016

> On Mar 10, 2016, at 07:55 , William Herrin <bill at herrin.us> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Mar 10, 2016 at 10:09 AM, Dennis Burgess
> <dmburgess at linktechs.net> wrote:
>> Not wishing to get into a pissing war with who is right or wrong, but it sounds like
>> google already pays or has an agreement with cogent for v4, as that's unaffected,
>> cogent says google is simply not advertising v6 prefixes to them, so, how is
>> that cogent's fault?
> 
> Hi Dennis,
> 
> It's Cogent's fault because: double-billing. Google should not have to
> pay Cogent for a service which you have already paid Cogent to provide
> to you. Cogent's demand is unethical. They intentionally fail to
> deliver on the basic service expectation you pay them for and refuse
> to do so unless a third party to your contract also pays them.
> 
> Google, by contrast, makes no demand that Cogent pay them even though
> you are not paying Google for service. They offer "open peering," a
> free interconnect via many neutral data centers.

In fairness, however, this is because he is not Google’s customer, he
is Google’s product. Google is selling him (well, information about him
anyway) to their customers. They gather this information by offering
certain things he wants in exchange for him allowing them to collect
and redistribute this data.

Everything you say above is true, but let’s be clear where the customer
vs. product relationships truly are.

Owen