[18921] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Transaction Based Settlements Encourage Waste (was Re: BBN/GTEI)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael Dillon)
Sat Aug 22 09:56:24 1998
Date: Sat, 22 Aug 1998 06:45:18 -0700 (PDT)
From: Michael Dillon <michael@memra.com>
To: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.3.95.980822000938.13066A-100000@ruby.he.net>
On Sat, 22 Aug 1998, Mike Leber wrote:
> If your split isn't 50/50 (in other words settlement free) I guarantee
> anybody with half a brain will balance out their traffic by hosting the
> correct type of applications so that you owe them money.
Of course if everybody does this, then the traffic will balance out. Seems
to be a good thing to create the incentive, no?
> In fact, TRANSACTION BASED SETTLEMENTS ENCOURAGE WASTE to the point where
> it should be obvious to the casual observer that anybody reasonably
> informed would never suggest them.
Then I must be unreasonably informed because I think that some form of
exchanging money to even out imbalances would give providers more choice.
> The factors that are the cause of the inherent problem with transactions
> based settlements are:
>
> 1) Either party can end up paying.
> 2) Transactions are generated by machines.
> 3) Machines can generate transactions which are either positive flow or
> negative flow. (web servers vs web crawlers as two simplistic examples).
OK. So now you've convinced us that network traffic shres a number of
characteristics with electric power distribution. Yet the power companies
seem to manage quite well with settlements. I wouldn't want to slavishly
imitate their system any more than I want to slavishly imitate the long
distance telcos. But these things can be made to work.
> Oh, and before anybody comes up with a simplistic (and flawed) rebuttal
> such as banning the large web crawlers from settlements, there are plenty
> of other legitimate automated methods of getting flows in either
> direction.
They aren't legitimate if the sole purpose of the method is to create
traffic; that would be fraud. A webcrawler would be fine if it was for a
search engine but not if you just ran it and discarded the data.
--
Michael Dillon - Internet & ISP Consulting
Memra Communications Inc. - E-mail: michael@memra.com
Check the website for my Internet World articles - http://www.memra.com
