Re: Generation of traffic in "settled" peering arrangement

[Patrick Greenwell <patrick () namesecure com>]

On 24 Aug 1998, Paul Vixie wrote:

> > Are you saying that someone should be forced to pay for the privilege of 
> > offering something for free to your customers? Things that your customers,
> > who I number among are requesting?
>
> I don't know what he was saying, but I'll say something like it: gatekeeper,
> wuarchive, cdrom.com, and other archives of free stuff are going to have to
> do some kind of micropayment scheme -- charge for downloads in other words --
> in order to pay their own costs to their providers, in order that those
> providers are able to pay THEIR costs, in transit they buy or in glass they
> lease or whatever.

Ok, it hasn't happened yet, and software has been distributed free for
quite some time, but let's assume that this is indeed the inevitable.

Who pays? 

Model 1 (current model):

a) Recipient pays provider extra for transmission. 
b) Sender may/may not pay extra for transmission (transit vs. peering)

Model 2 (new, shiny, "improved" model):

a) Recipient pays sender for download.
b) Recipient pays extra for transmission. 
c) Sender pays provider extra for transmission. 

Well, wait a minute, doesn't the recipient already normally pay? I have
three different providers, BBN being one of them. All bill on the 95th
percentile. If I want more data, I pay for the privilege. Works for me. I
understand that some providers bill flat-rate. That's their business
decision, and may or may not scale. 

In the case of BBN, I am paying for end to end connectivity to whatever
portion of the Internet that happens to be operational at that moment. *I*
am already paying for the cost of BBN to get the data from wherever to me.   

So now under model 2, I am paying twice, not because cdrom.com or wherever
wants to charge me extra, but because they are forced to pay for the
privilege of sending me data that I requested and am already paying the
transmission costs for. The net effect is that the transit provider is
double-dipping, and it costs the receiver twice to receive the data. 

Somehow this doesn't seem to be very attractive to me. 

> The Internet backbone's growth has been all about barriers to entry and in
> special deals.  People have been buying their provisioning at flat rate or
> with other subsidies, and reselling it at variable rates to folks who came
> later or otherwise didn't have access to, or knowledge of, the special deals
> of the pioneers.  Eventually these special deals run out of time, or run out
> of bandwidth, and a true (cost-driven) market economy is developing.
>
> What we're seeing now is just SO inevitable.

Don't worry, we'll be paying for the commercial release of BIND
when you guys start selling it... ;-)

I thought the whole idea with this Net thingy was to make bandwidth so
cheap it wasn't an issue. This of course is a pipe dream. The real idea
from the "pros" seems to go something like: "The idea is to make
bandwidth so cheap that it doesn't cost us anything to deliver, but allows
us to charge the same or more for."
 
Am I close?

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                           Systems Administrator         (925) 377-1212 v
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