Level 3’s Selective Amnesia on Peering (opens in new tab)

Two companies, A and B, have a network connection between them. Packets flowing through this wire fall into three categories:

   * Traffic for which both A and B are being paid by their respective customers
   * Traffic for which A is being paid by the sender or recipient, but B is not paid
   * Traffic for which B is being paid by the sender or recipient, but A is not paid

The latter two categories are called "transit"; that's when you carry packets between two parties, neither of which is directly your customer. There is an established tradition which says that if two companies set up a connection which carries transit, the flow of traffic across it should be balanced.

Currently, there is controversy over a large amount of traffic flowing like this:

    Netflix -> Level 3 -> Verizon -> Consumers

For which the corresponding flow of dollars looks like this:

    Netflix -> Level 3    Verizon <- Consumers

In the past, it has sometimes been difficult to frame peering in terms of who's paying who, so it was instead framed in terms of senders and recipients, rather than in terms of who's paying who. Verizon is trying to use this framing to say that Level 3 should pay them. But looking at the economics, it's clear that neither Level 3 nor Verizon should be paying the other, because each of them is already being paid for the traffic by their respective customers.

This argument is regurgitated ad-nauseam and is selective ignorance. Let me repeat what has been repeated literally thousands of times: A ISP will not have the same ingress and egress traffic due to two reasons: 1. Download speed is usually more than upload speed, 2. There is nothing to peer with due to TOS / customers not running services.

Verizon just wants to double dip and get more money, as a business with commitments to shareholders this is a reasonable argument, as a person that can reason it is very ignorant.

I don't get this response.

> Rather than buy the capacity they need, Level 3 insists that Verizon should add capacity to the existing peering link for additional downstream traffic even though the traffic is already wildly out of balance.

So... Verizon doesn't even claim it's impossible, or the wrong solution. L3 says they need additional peering links and is willing to pay for the cards. Both companies have spare capacity on both sides of that link. The complaint is weird too "the traffic is already wildly out of balance" - of course it is - they're an ISP! Of course the customers will download more than upload.

What's wrong with that? Could someone explain why it isn't an accepted solution?

This is a rebuttal by David Young, Vice President, Verizon Regulatory Affairs to Level 3's blog regarding peering and bottlenecks [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8048997

The absurdity of this become apparent when you realize that Netflix has code running on both sides of the connection. Netflix could easily modify its client-side code to upload random data of the same size as the content it's downloading, or whatever size is necessary to ensure settlement-free peering.

Verizon is in the process of switching to all-symmetric connections, so this is a little less absurd than it was a week ago.

My main question is this: have other CDNs been paying ISPs like Verizon for a while for additional peering?

Jesus Christ. This whole thing reminds me of when I was a kid and my divorced parents were having a legal battle over child support payments, and each one was telling me their version of how horrible the other parent was, and why they should get more money (like I had any say in the matter). It was transparently manipulative then, and it's transparently manipulative now.

Can't anyone act like adults these days? Or is this just how adults behave?