[163923] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: net neutrality and peering wars continue
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Woodcock)
Fri Jun 21 04:55:29 2013
From: Bill Woodcock <woody@pch.net>
In-Reply-To: <20130620203956.GV55976@burnout.tpb.net>
Date: Fri, 21 Jun 2013 01:54:42 -0700
To: Niels Bakker <niels=nanog@bakker.net>
Cc: nanog@nanog.org
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On Jun 20, 2013, at 1:39 PM, Niels Bakker <niels=3Dnanog@bakker.net> =
wrote:
> You're mistaken if you think that CDNs have equal number of packets =
going in and out.
I'm aware that neither the quantity nor the size of packets in each =
direction are equal. I'm just hard-pressed to think of a reason why =
this matters, and so tend to hand-wave about it a bit=85 To a rough =
approximation, flows are balanced. Someone requests something, and an =
answer follows. Requests tend to be small, but if someone requests =
something large, a large answer follows. Conversely, people also send =
things, which are followed by small acknowledgements. Again, this only =
matters if you place a great deal of importance both on the notion that =
size equals fairness, and that fairness is more important than =
efficiency. I would argue that neither are true. I'm far more =
interested in seeing the cost of Internet service go down, than seeing =
two providers saddled with equally high costs in the name of fairness. =
And costs go down most quickly when each provider retains the full =
incentivization of its own ability to minimize costs. Not when they =
have to worry about "fairness" in an arbitrary metric, relative to other =
providers.
The only occasion I can think of when traffic flows of symmetric volume =
have an economic benefit are when a third party is imposing excess rent =
on circuits, such that the cost of upgrading capacity is higher than the =
cost of "traffic engineering" flows to fill reverse paths. And that's =
hardly the sort of mental pretzels I want carriers to be having to worry =
about, instead of moving bits to customers.
> I think the point is here that networks are nudging these decisions by =
making certain services suck more than others by way of preferential =
network access.
I agree completely that that's the problem. But it didn't appear to be =
what Benson was talking about.
-Bill
