[jerkstate]

That's true. Content providers usually pay a (usually many) intermediary (usually a tier 1 or tier 2 backbone provider) to deliver the traffic to the ISP. In order to deliver the traffic from one network to the other, both companies need to have short and long haul cables, routers with high speed interfaces, and employees to manage and maintain those things. So there are costs of this traffic borne by both companies. They are both getting paid by their customers to deliver the traffic, but the "peering agreement" between them governs the cost sharing responsibility of that link between the two of them. If the intermediary fails to fulfill their obligations according to the peering agreement, it is opaque to the customer who is not living up to their end of the contract (and always blamed on the end-user's ISP)

[bifrost]

Its rarely opaque TBH. Its usually pretty obvious who's failing to hold up to their end of the bargain. Gamers figure this out on their own all the time.

[jerkstate]

I've seen a lot of cases where people think they figured it out but are wrong. Traceroutes are hard to interpret. Did you know that most paths on the Internet are asymmetric, and traceroute doesn't tell you what the reverse path is?

[bifrost]

Yes, I've actually run part of the internet for around 16 years.

[jerkstate]

great, maybe you can provide evidence to back up your claim that gamers can (accurately) determine which party is in breach of a peering agreement

[bifrost]

Ok, if you run a traceroute from both sides you can determine both paths (generally). If you use mtr or something like that along the way you'll usually see some "bright lines" in latency/loss/etc. Its not bulletproof but generally works.

That said - a peering agreement can have a variety of terms so a gamer isn't likely to be privvy to that. But if you see latency and loss on a certain link, you've likely identified the problem. Typically both parties are bound to solve it if its the actual peering link, a fair amount of the time its an individual ISPs problem so that ISP would be obligated to upgrade its internal link(s) to meet the demands of its customers.

Some time ago (2014) I convinced (forced under contract) a very large last-mile carrier to fix/upgrade its internal links after I browned out a few counties with my paid-for usage. Its not that hard, it just took a lot of phonecalls on my part and calls with our finance department... I guess the alternative was for them to let me continue browning out their customers for a section of the San Francisco bay area, having them ragequit and switching to someone else. Or wasting thousands and thousands of hours with customers complaining about terrible service.

[jerkstate]

I don't dispute that you can usually locate the link that's saturated if you can traceroute from both sides. I think we both agree that an end user can't figure out which end of the link is not holding up their end of the contract.

Good on you for getting a big telco to live up to their agreement. I doubt that lack of tenacity is the problem in cases having to do with large isp/video streaming/cdn players.