
FCC asked six more ISPs, content providers to reveal paid peering deals - rosser
http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/08/fcc-asked-six-more-isps-and-content-providers-to-reveal-paid-peering-deals/
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BrandonMarc
I call shenanigans. The FCC demands paid peering contract details, for the
stated goal of providing "transparency" and "answers" to the U.S. public ...
but when Ars sends an FOIA request, it's all "hey, this is confidential stuff,
we can't release it" ...

How much you wanna bet someone at the FCC has close friends at L3, Comcast, or
even the entities involved in these deals? And somehow these secrets will find
their way into their hands ...

Nah, a government agency would never share your valuable secrets with your
competitors / enemies. Oh, wait.

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chatmasta
That kind of sharing doesn't even have to be explicit. Once this information
is in the FCC's hands (and who does that mean exactly? Wheeler? Wheeler's
assistant? His gold buddies? His wife? Last I checked the FCC is not full of
spies with top-secret clearance, but rather a bunch of ex-telecom execs), it
will slip into the hands of the big companies without anyone even revealing it
intentionally. Just by knowing the data, people at the FCC will slip up in
conversation with cable execs, accidentally saying just enough to imply the
details of a peering deal. e.g. "That's all Netflix is offering you for that
level of peering? I'm surprised, seems much less than average." A sentence
like that is all it would take for a Verizon exec to infer that Comcast is
getting a better peering deal from Netflix than him.

All that said, personally I don't see why these deals shouldn't be open. If
you ask me, peering should work the same as ad-serving. That is, there should
be an open marketplace for BGP routes where companies can submit real time
bids to each other. Anyone with sufficient routing, whether Netflix or a small
startup, should be able to participate in the market. Let supply and demand
determine the deals.

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wmf
_Let supply and demand determine the deals._

In other words, let ISPs' stranglehold on their customers run totally
unchecked.

~~~
chatmasta
Or, put another way, allow companies other than ISPs and massive content
distributors to build scalable networks by negotiating bandwidth at a fair
rate, instead of absurd prices like $0.10 per gigabyte transferred.

