Re: CDNs should pay eyeball networks, too.

[William Herrin <bill () herrin us>]

On 5/1/12, Patrick W. Gilmore <patrick () ianai net> wrote:
> On May 1, 2012, at 13:26 , William Herrin wrote:
> > If I'm willing to go to your location, buy the card for your router
> > and pay you for the staff hours to set it up, there should be *no*
> > situation in which I'm willing to accept your traffic from an upstream
> > Internet link but am unwilling to engage in otherwise settlement-free
> > peering with you.
>
> I disagree with this.  In fact, I can think of several possible cases where
> this would not hold, both using pure business and pure technical
> justifications.

Hi Patrick,

Please educate me. I'd be happy to adopt a more nuanced view.


> > Your customers have paid you to connect to me and my customers have
> > paid me to connect to you. Double-billing the activity by either of us
> > collecting money from the other is just plain wrong.
>
> Wrong?  My rule is: Your network, your decision.

Yes, wrong. Some decisions fall in to areas covered by general ethics.

You sell a customer a red ball when you know you can only deliver
green balls, it's a lie. Unethical. Wrong.

You work for a company (W2 salary) and in the course of your work
contract something to another company where you're an officer it's a
conflict of interest. Unethical. Wrong.

A customer pays you to build a piece of software by the hour. Another
comes along and asks for the same software. You bill both for each
hour. Double billing. Unethical. Wrong.

A customer pays you to deliver a packet to "the Internet." You talk to
the packet's destination and say, "Hey, I'll deliver it to you
directly but only if you pay me. Otherwise I'll just toss it out in a
random direction and hope it gets there." Double billing. Unethical.
Wrong.

None of these things is necessarily illegal although like spam some of
them are illegal under specific conditions. Yet all of them (and spam)
are Wrong.

Regards,
Bill Herrin



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William D. Herrin ................ herrin () dirtside com  bill () herrin us
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