[wayoutthere]

The ISPs charge lots of money for the CDNs and private networks that want to connect to their customer networks at the edge. This is the net neutrality argument; it's almost impossible to get good performance at scale without paying extra for it.

I actually think the problem this is meant to solve is an example of why, from a purely pragmatic sense, net neutrality is effectively impossible to deliver at scale. Someone has to eat the costs somewhere, and the publishers are the ones who benefit the most financially.

[wbl]

A bike courier or lawyer racing to the court house benefits far more from the roads then others but doesn't pay more. Common carrier regulations were widespread in moving atoms.

[wayoutthere]

Then why are toll roads a thing? They explicitly allow vehicles to pay more for a faster road.

[gnode]

Toll roads charge you for travelling over them. They don't charge the business you're travelling to based on how much value you have to them as a customer.

[Braggadocious]

not really a faster road as anyone stuck in an expresslane behind a prius will tell you, but a less congested road free of peasants. Not really sure how this analogy syncs up but just throwing in my $0.02.

[wayoutthere]

> but a less congested road free of peasants

That's exactly what paid prioritization is though? A less congested bandwidth link free of peasants?

[Braggadocious]

Yeah no i see what you're goin for. Maybe comparing public roads to air travel would be a better analogy? Idk im just being a nudge.

[throw0101a]

> The ISPs charge lots of money for the CDNs and private networks that want to connect to their customer networks at the edge.

CDNs can get closer to end-users by peering at Internet Exchange Points (IXPs).

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_exchange_point

Maybe not as close/fast as right on an ISP's network, but probably closer than a trans-continent or trans-ocean hop.

[wayoutthere]

That's how it works; no large telco I've ever worked for is willing to put third party gear (or really any gear that hasn't gone through extensive validation) into their head ends. An IXP is just a datacenter that the big ISPs and transit providers use to exchange traffic. The business agreements determine the price paid (which in some cases is zero, but often not, and is negotiated like any other business deal).

[throw0101a]

> The business agreements determine the price paid (which in some cases is zero, but often not, and is negotiated like any other business deal).

I do not understand this part: why is a business agreement necessary to simply discover BGP paths?

There is an ISP with users that want to go to Youtube or Akamai: the ISP has a router with the full BGP prefix list of the Internet, including for those of YT and A. YT and A are probably in most of the larger IXPs, and presumably the ISP in question is also at a few IXPs.

Why would a business agreement be necessary for the ISP to send traffic over the IXP's switches to the CDN(s)? What's the point of connecting into an IXP if you add the 'overhead' of business agreements?

[wayoutthere]

> Why would a business agreement be necessary for the ISP to send traffic over the IXP's switches to the CDN(s)?

Because that's how distribution works and has always worked under corporate capitalism: the company making money off the content itself pays to distribute it (on the Internet, this is generally understood to be the originator of the packets). So the ISPs charge the CDNs and companies like Netflix to accept their traffic. A common argument is "well I already pay for that as a customer!" Telecom business models are a lot more complicated than that, and if 100% of their revenue came from subscription fees you'd be paying a lot more than you do now.

> What's the point of connecting into an IXP if you add the 'overhead' of business agreements?

Because it's a convenient location to house network gear with easy access to multiple large ISPs and upstream networks? An IXP is just a datacenter. What makes it an IXP is the fact that multiple large telco networks are hosted there.

From the wikipedia article linked above: "The Vancouver Transit Exchange, for example, is described as a 'shopping mall' of service providers at one central location, making it easy to switch providers, 'as simple as getting a VLAN to a new provider'. The VTE is run by BCNET, a public entity."

[throw0101a]

I am aware of paying for transit, which allows you to access larger swaths of the Internet through someone else's (better connected) network.

But if I am with an ISP A, and I want to watch something on YouTube, then given that I am paying my ISP for connecting me to "the Internet", and YT is on "the Internet", how/why would YT pay the ISP anything?

How exactly would an ISP charge a CDN, YT, or Netflix? The content distributors simply connect to the Internet and advertise via BGP: besides paying their own ISP(s), how would a content provider pay a 'distant ISP'? If a content provider is willing to pay for dark fibre and install their own gear into IXPs, how would any ISP issue an invoice to the CDN(s)?

And the "transit exchange" at VanIX seems to be separate from the open peering option available by simply advertising to the router servers. From the sentence right before the one you quote:

> When these conditions are met, and a contractual structure exists to create a market to purchase network services, the IXP is sometimes called a "transit exchange".

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_exchange_point#Traffi...

TorIX has the majority of participants doing simple peering:

> The Exchange also offers two BGP Route-Servers, which allow peers to exchange prefixes with each other while minimizing the number of direct BGP peering sessions configured on their routers.[3] Participation is voluntary, with approximately 85 percent of the membership using the free service.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_Internet_Exchange

[gnode]

This is not the net neutrality argument. It should be a cost saving for both the CDN and ISP to connect directly, because this saves both parties needing to pay for IP transit. That the ISP may charge the CDN for this is because in a vacuous regulatory environment they have been allowed to ransom their customers.

The behaviour of discriminating based on application or financial potential is not tolerated (legally or socially) in other common carriers like mail.

[wayoutthere]

> It should be a cost saving for both the CDN and ISP to connect directly, because this saves both parties needing to pay for IP transit.

It almost always is a cost savings -- I've worked enough interconnect agreements and the dispute is always over value capture (who gets how much). Transit is expensive; but transit is paid by the originator. The ISPs incur indirect costs that are harder to measure, so it has to be negotiated.

> The behaviour of discriminating based on application or financial potential is not tolerated (legally or socially) in other common carriers like mail.

It's not? Because big companies absolutely get preferential treatment with mail too. USPS does things for Amazon they do not for anyone else.

It hasn't always been like this, but deregulation craze in the 90s/2000s weakened a lot of the protections we had against it.