North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Transaction Based Settlements Encourage Waste (was Re: BBN/GTEI)
On Sat, 22 Aug 1998, Mike Leber wrote: > If your split isn't 50/50 (in other words settlement free) I guarantee > anybody with half a brain will balance out their traffic by hosting the > correct type of applications so that you owe them money. Of course if everybody does this, then the traffic will balance out. Seems to be a good thing to create the incentive, no? > In fact, TRANSACTION BASED SETTLEMENTS ENCOURAGE WASTE to the point where > it should be obvious to the casual observer that anybody reasonably > informed would never suggest them. Then I must be unreasonably informed because I think that some form of exchanging money to even out imbalances would give providers more choice. > The factors that are the cause of the inherent problem with transactions > based settlements are: > > 1) Either party can end up paying. > 2) Transactions are generated by machines. > 3) Machines can generate transactions which are either positive flow or > negative flow. (web servers vs web crawlers as two simplistic examples). OK. So now you've convinced us that network traffic shres a number of characteristics with electric power distribution. Yet the power companies seem to manage quite well with settlements. I wouldn't want to slavishly imitate their system any more than I want to slavishly imitate the long distance telcos. But these things can be made to work. > Oh, and before anybody comes up with a simplistic (and flawed) rebuttal > such as banning the large web crawlers from settlements, there are plenty > of other legitimate automated methods of getting flows in either > direction. They aren't legitimate if the sole purpose of the method is to create traffic; that would be fraud. A webcrawler would be fine if it was for a search engine but not if you just ran it and discarded the data. -- Michael Dillon - Internet & ISP Consulting Memra Communications Inc. - E-mail: [email protected] Check the website for my Internet World articles - http://www.memra.com
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