@scottalanmiller said:
Peering is swapping or doing favours (that sounds naughty.)
Netflix is a customer. A big customer. The biggest. Netflix is a special case, sort of, due to their size. But they shouldn't be treated unfairly and in this case I doubt that they are. But if we agree that they are not really peering and are, according to the Wikipedia article, just a "customer" then.... what's the discussion about? I'm a customer in the same way. I have a network that pays for a link to a peer-level carrier. Aren't we back to Netflix being a subscriber / customer like me?
this was my whole point. Why is Netflix being singled out? It's true that Netflix is pumping out tons more data than it brings in, but that really shouldn't be Netflix's problem, that should be Cogent's problem since Cogent is providing the ISP access (the real Peering points) to the rest of the internet. Cogent is the one in violation of peering agreement with the other providers.
Scott's right, the internet's model is now broken. Perhaps Cogent should have simply said.. sorry Netflix, you're using an unbalanced amount of internet traffic, so you have to stop, or we have to find a new model to bill you upon.
Netflix has started doing this on their own already by placing banks of servers directly on several of the major players networks so that customers of those networks aren't traveling over the Peering links to get the content.
My next question is, why did some carriers accept this and others not? It is because Verizon didn't want to allow Netflix to compete with it's own content? and this was/is a way to hold them hostage?
