[seszett]

I would have guessed it was French ISP Proxad/Free, which is notorious for having generally shitty peering to a large part of Internet (like Youtube, Imgur or Github, among others).

But though they are a large ISP they are not dominant, and their peering with Level3 is actually quite good... which is why I tunnel most of my connection to my server (the route to which happens to be through Level3) so I can get usable internet.

It really sucks to be able to download an iso from some server in the US at 2 MB/s, but seeing small Imgur gifs load frame by frame, or Github repos cloning at 20 kB/s.

[zero_intp]

Free just doesn't buy enough transit; they are not a tier 1 provider.

[seszett]

The ISPs in question explicitly aren't tier 1 providers.

Free is tier 2, and they are very much behaving like the ISPs the article is talking about, just not with Level 3.

[zero_intp]

Free buys transit, and that transit is full. All the time. The article is talking about settlement free peering. There are significant differences between Free running their uplinks hot and a peering partners running their interconnects hot.