must read really FCC NPRM ban on Paid Peering harms new innovators

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Stan Hanks <stan () colventures com>
> Date: November 12, 2009 4:07:33 PM EST
> To: dave () farber net
> Subject: RE: [IP] Re:    FCC NPRM ban on Paid Peering harms new  
> innovators

> Wow... This all brings back a ton of stuff...
>
> So, in the early 90s, I was involved in the creation of the MAE East
> peering point. Initially, it was a "Metropolitan Area Ethernet" to  
> solve
> Steve Wolfe's problem of not getting Marty Schofstall and Rick Adams  
> to
> agree to play nice and meet the NSFnet and CSnet in a convenient
> location, but as we all know, it exploded into something much larger.
>
> The MFS MAE model was simple "we don't charge you for moving  
> packets, we
> charge you for ports, and you work out the details on exchanging  
> packets
> with whomever you want to exchange packets with on your own". In
> practice, the model that DJF noted was the rule of the day -- to avoid
> having to address the "settlement" issue, everyone agreed to pretend
> like traffic exchange would be in parity and thus no settlement was
> needed. That worked *great* when there were only a handful of  
> networks,
> and when MOST of the traffic was "classic ARPAnet style traffic" --  
> FTP,
> email, TELNET, etc.
>
> The advent of the "world wide web" changed all that. Suddenly two  
> things
> happened -- first, there were a HUGE number of entrants to the
> networking game, and second, traffic flows became inherently  
> unbalanced.
>
>
> At the last point where I had personal knowledge, which was probably  
> '94
> or '95, there were close to 300 parties connected to MAE East. I
> understand that it went up from there. That's an INSANE number of
> network peering relationships to manage!
>
> The very nature of "web pages" also was a big deal. Whereas with  
> email,
> it's reasonable to assume I send you one, you send me one, we're
> probably writing about the same amount, on average it all balances,  
> web
> pages just don't work that way. Send a very small number of bytes  
> asking
> for a page to be served, get a potentially unbounded number of bytes
> back in the form of text, image, video, what have you. Instant  
> nightmare
> for people trying to manage traffic on networks.
>
> When I was putting together what became Enron Broadband, one of the
> early directions we looked at was becoming a major "Tier One" ISP
> backbone. At the time, "Free Peering" was the rule of the day, but was
> already dying. If you didn't have peering established, it was very
> difficult to get. My engineering team put in a lot of time and I  
> pulled
> a lot of personal relationship strings, but it finally became clear  
> that
> if we wanted to do this, and have free peering, the only way to get
> there was to acquire players who had the peering that we wanted. That
> was in '97.
>
> By 1999, it was pretty much all over. Level 3 was talking in terms of
> "suck" and "blow" -- are you pulling traffic out, or are you sending
> traffic? And if you were sending them more traffic than they sent you,
> you had to pay. Period.
>
> You see that replayed countless times since, the most recent being in
> the dispute with Cogent.
>
> The economic argument is interesting. If you're a content provider, a
> "net source" of traffic, you argue that the end user subscribers are
> only customers of their network provider in order to gain access to  
> the
> information provided by the content providers, and thus the network
> providers should be glad that the info is there because otherwise they
> wouldn't have any customers. Of course, the network providers take the
> obverse position...
>
> My take is that from a amount of work and investment of capital,  
> it's a
> LOT harder and more expensive to provide an operating network than  
> it is
> to provide a web server farm, and thus my bias is towards the guys  
> with
> content paying the guys with pipes to get it delivered.
>
> But the truth is, it doesn't matter. If you want to do business, you
> have to accept that it's just a matter of economics, and you either  
> have
> to figure out how to make the economics of paid transit work for  
> you, or
> you have to figure out how to scale large enough that you can build
> enough of your own infrastructure to pose a credible threat to the
> network provider establishment that they're willing to modify their
> terms for your benefit.
>
> Stan



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