Re: Cogent - Google - HE Fun

[Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>]

> On Mar 11, 2016, at 06:16 , William Herrin <bill () herrin us> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Mar 11, 2016 at 7:40 AM, Jon Lewis <jlewis () lewis org> wrote:
> > On Thu, 10 Mar 2016, William Herrin wrote:
> > > It's Cogent's fault because: double-billing. Google should not have to
> > > pay Cogent for a service which you have already paid Cogent to provide
> > > to you. Cogent's demand is unethical. They intentionally fail to
> > > deliver on the basic service expectation you pay them for and refuse
> > > to do so unless a third party to your contract also pays them.
> >
> > That's one way of looking at it.
> >
> > However, which of your transits don't bill for bits exchanged with other
> > customers of theirs...and how are they or you accounting for that traffic?
>
> Hi Jon,
>
> As you know, there is a technology limitation in how routing works
> which says that for any given block of addresses you can, absent
> extraordinary measures, have a peering relationship or a transit
> relationship but not both. If both parties choose to have a transit

Not really.

If you have both, then there’s no easy way to guarantee that you get
paid for every piece of transit (though relatively simple localpref
tactics will actually make it likely that you also get paid for
many bits of peering).

> relationship, that excludes a peering relationship for the relevant
> blocks of addresses. And that's OK when _both sides_ choose it.

Your premise is flawed.

> In related news, no ethical conundrum demands defiance of the law of gravity.

True, but gravity is real. Your law of peering vs. transit above is
purely artificial and fails utterly if you don’t accept that an approximation
of which bits fall into which category is “close enough” for billing
purposes.

I’m not making any value judgments on whether accepting that idea is good
or bad. I know that there are networks that act in various ways on both
sides of this idea.

However, equating it to “the law of gravity” is rather silly given that it
is 100% mutable if we take the accounting out of the picture.

No amount of monetary policy change can counteract gravity.

Owen