[No1]

>1) The ISPs are willing to interconnect, they just aren't willing to interconnect in an unbalanced fashion without being compensated.

Keep in mind the ISPs provide highly asymmetrical connections to their customers, prohibit those customers from running servers, then cry foul over an imbalance.

Their consumer networks are designed to be imbalanced; there is not even a chance of them being balanced.

> ...but you can't force them to maintain speed on specific interconnects. If Cogent has a shitty network that isn't on Verizon.

No one is proposing holding Verizon accountable for Cogent's performance across Cogent nodes. It is possible to mandate packet delay / rejection limits specifically at the interconnect.

[msandford]

> Keep in mind the ISPs provide highly asymmetrical connections to their customers, prohibit those customers from running servers, then cry foul over an imbalance.

Actually, it's worse than that. They then cry foul over the people who are doing their best to provide that asymmetric data without complaining. Why aren't Level3 and Cogent bitching about the imbalance?

From a very high level the internet can (and should) be thought of as pull-only. If you start sending me data that I have't requested, most people would consider that a DOS. If a bunch of people start sending me data I haven't requested, that's a DDoS. If both parties consent to the data being transferred, that's GENERALLY done through a pull-style arrangement.

Yes I do realize that uploading files to a website might be considered and colloquially referred to as "push" but if the machine that's receiving the upload stops sending ACKs then the machine sending the upload stops sending more data.

The ISPs are selling as asymmetric service but then getting upset if you use it asymmetrically because they assumed that the average utilization of the service might only be 0.1%. In reality it's turning out that the average utilization is more like 1% or 5% and this means they have to upgrade their infrastructure continually rather than one-and-done. I'm not sure that I feel badly for them. It's obvious that people use a lot of bandwidth and they're only going to want to use more.