Exactly correct. A lot of business in Germany is like this, passive-aggressive money taking.
DT is saying they had an agreement of interconnection for payment, Facebook stopped paying, a court said it has to keep paying, and Facebook decided to end the interconnection instead of continuing to pay. DT, in typical German fashion, insists on continuing to receive payment. Because it's Germany, they'll probably go back to court and be able to win another case and forcibly extract payment even though the service is no longer provided.
> DT is saying they had an agreement of interconnection for payment, Facebook stopped paying, a court said it has to keep paying, and Facebook decided to end the interconnection instead of continuing to pay.
This (and the DT article) seems to imply Meta stopped paying without ending the interconnect. That seems like a reasonable reason to want to be paid?
> This (and the DT article) seems to imply Meta stopped paying without ending the interconnect. That seems like a reasonable reason to want to be paid?
It takes two to keep a BGP peering session up: if DT didn't want the traffic without being paid they could have shut things down on their end too:
> the company feeds a gigantic 3.5 terabytes into Deutsche Telekom's network [...] Deutsche Telekom has done everything in its power to ensure smooth data traffic. [...] The start of the rerouting of data traffic in the night from Tuesday to Wednesday went smoothly.
It sounds to me like DT was not prepared to handle the volume of this traffic along the alternate paths it would have taken if Meta's paid transit sessions were removed, so in the interest of avoiding disruption of their network, kept them running temporarily, settlement-free, until mitigation was completed. Great deal for Meta while it lasted!
The word "deal" implies some kind of (commercial) transaction that has a price tag associated with it (deal = good price).
But DT keeping this peering connection up should be (IMHO) DT just doing the job they're paid for.
DT's customers pay for "Internet access", and since Meta is on the Internet, the customers should be able to connect to it. Customer's send requests to Meta, DT passes those requests along, and it is DT's job to pass along Meta's responses.
Why should Meta pay DT anything? DT is claiming to offer a service, and part of that service is transporting the responses to DT's customer's requests. If those responses are high bandwidth it is part of DT's job to deal with it. If 'dealing with it' entails special connections to particular corners of the Internet to better serve their customer's then it is DT's job to do that.