North American Network Operators Group

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welcome to the one size fits all Internet discussion swamp

  • From: Jerry Scharf
  • Date: Sun Aug 23 02:49:37 1998

I think we're being more than a little silly here. Person A says that the 
financial model for internet peering should be client funded, and B says no is 
should be content provider.

folks, you can both be right for various situations. Most newspapers and 
magazines are largely paid for by the advertiser. Most subsciption services 
are paid for mostly by the clients. In each case the line is not simple, and 
the delivery media adapts to the money flow and vice versa.

The problem comes from one of two major insanity swamps.

a) deciding that there is one model that should be used for pricing.

b) trying to decide how to classify a given flow, and the contractual concepts 
involved. Maybe I'm just hardened to it all, but anything I can't describe in 
a contract with terms, costs and redress is too soft for me to chage money.

That's why we have these simple minded peering agreements. Anything beyond the 
mindless trading starts you onto a slippery slope from which I see no return. 
Phone settlements are 100x simpler than this stuff, and you see as the cost of 
haul drops this will become a major part of total cost of a phone call. I can 
understand bandwidth times distance hauled in simple terms, so saying I may 
not accept nearest exit routing from someone else is within my scope of simple 
minded.

my last mail on this whole subject,
jerry