On Jul 22, 2014, at 3:10 PM, Paul Graydon wrote: > On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 02:46:32PM -0700, David Lang wrote: >> On Tue, 22 Jul 2014, Will Dennis wrote: >> >>> I think all of this PR battle (which now parts of the LOPSA >>> membership is getting sucked into ;) is over Netflix trying not to >>> have to pay VZ to reach their customers like they did Comcast -- >>> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/24/business/media/comcast-and-netflix-reach-a-streaming-agreement.html >> >> I agree that this is what Verizon is trying to do. I think the >> comcast agreement was a bad thing for the Internet (for all the >> reasons mentioned here) > > You have to understand, this is common practice. Almost all of the major > internet companies pay various ISPs to compensate them for the amount of > traffic. > Netflix is one of the very few that hasn't been. You can argue about whether > it's a good idea or not, but the precedent is long established. > > Paul
I've been waiting to wade into this conversation, avoiding the back-and-forth. I'll try to get all my contribution, FWIW, into this email, but to make my position clear, Derek has been saying most of the things I would've. The main point that needs to be made, and which almost never is in these discussions or in articles about Netflix or Net Neutrality, is that there is nothing fundamentally new here (along the lines of what Paul said). Internet peering agreements have a couple of decades of tradition behind them (as do conflicts about peering). True peering, in which money doesn't change hands, has always been based on an assumption of roughly equal traffic. If you want to hook up to someone else's network and aren't willing or able to offload about as much traffic from your peering partner as you intend to send, then you're going to pay for it. It's true what one discussion participant said, to a certain extent: the fact that it's Netflix sending all this traffic is none of Verizon's business. Verizon's direct issue is with Level 3, and normally it would be Level 3 obligated to pay Verizon; the case for Verizon to pay is nonexistent, AFAICT, based on traditional arrangements. However, it's clear that the majority of traffic under dispute is generated from just one customer of Level 3, and it would be nonsensical for Verizon or anyone else to ignore that. The situation is pretty simple: Netflix is already paying what is presumably a bunch of money to Level 3 and doesn't want to give any more to Verizon (as they already agreed to do with Comcast); Level 3 is getting a bunch of money from Netflix but doesn't want to pay its share to the providers with whom it connects; and Verizon doesn't want to commit to supporting one of Level 3's customers at its own expense. All understandable, but there's a clear precedent to follow: Level 3 should pay to peer with Verizon, or Netflix should pay to peer directly with Verizon. All the rest is a political smokescreen. On Jul 22, 2014, at 1:36 PM, Steve VanDevender wrote: > Netflix isn't flooding Verizon's network for no reason, Verizon's own > customers are requesting the traffic from Netflix. Perhaps Verizon has > some obligation to serve its customers in that case? Sure, but as a for-profit corporation, Verizon has a more urgent obligation to make a profit. They can't take responsibility for supporting Netflix's business; it would be financially irresponsible. Say Verizon bites the bullet and pays to upgrade their capacity at the interconnect now. What do they do as Netflix's customer base continues to grow? What do they do when Netflix has the power to make arbitary changes on their side that impact Verizon: back off on compression to provider higher video quality, start delivering 4k video as it becomes available, etc.? Keep in mind that Netflix has no contractual relationship with Verizon to limit this kind of thing. You're asking Verizon to be at the mercy of one of their competitor's customers; what responsible corporate leadership would agree to that? Carrier-grade equipment is expensive to purchase, maintain, and replace. For Verizon to make that investment, they'll need a source of funding. They could leave Netflix and Level 3 alone, as you would advocate, and charge their customers more, either by instituting bandwidth-based billing to target Netflix customers or by raising rates on everyone, and then watch as their customer base bleeds off to their competitors (including Comcast where available, which receives its funding directly from Netflix). Or they could get the money from Level 3 or Netflix, which is the established way to do it. On Jul 22, 2014, at 2:14 PM, David Lang wrote: > I happen to believe that the world where Verizon wins and every server is > potentially supposed to pay every ISP for the traffic generated is a worse > world than the one where L3 wins and peering remains a relatively small > portion of everyone's budget and the ISPs continue to cooperate. That's a straw-man extension of the situation. No one is suggesting that everyone providing a service on the Internet should pay every ISP in the world to reach their customers; that is a patently ridiculous notion, and the fact that it gets discussed is a sign of how out-of-whack this issue has become. This is a bog-standard peering disagreement being elevated to a political hullabaloo by Netflix and Level 3 who don't want to pay their share according to rules that have been established for something like 20 years. It's because of the enormous amount of traffic Netflix is serving that the issue of payment has arisen. The local gift shop is not going to have to pay Verizon and Belgacom and some podunk Siberian ISP to make their Website reachable. Claiming that this is the the sign of some sort of Internet apocalypse instead of what it is -- old-fashioned business negotiations -- invests this issue with a lot more energy than it deserves. In the end, Netflix will pay, one way or another. Companies do this kind of thing every day, and have for a long time. - Leon _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.lopsa.org https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
