this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2023
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We are likely going to see more of this kind of thing.
Services like Twitch, Netflix, etc have had a long time of using the pipes for low or no cost, and contributing nothing to the network except congestion.
No one expects the roads to be maintained for free, and for businesses that use the roads, they gotta pay.
EDIT: I retract my statement, barsoap gave a pretty detailed explanation of what's going on here.
So do you think that shipping companies should charge fees to both sender and recipient? Because that's the physical equivalent of this situation.
I pay my ISP to deliver data to me at an agreed rate. The data being streamed from the bandwidth heavy sources has been paid for... By me. It would be wrong for my ISP to then go and charge them for the bandwidth that I'm using, much in the same way it would be wrong for a company to both charge the sender and receiver of a package just because that package is heavier than normal.
And many of the CDN agreements that bandwidth heavy content providers sign with ISPs have favourable terms specifically because those ISPs recognise that having good access to that content is exactly what their customers are paying for... At least the ones not completely blinded by greed do.
That's not how billing works on the internet: You hook up to an IXP for a flat rate depending on the port bandwidth you want, then make peering agreements with other people there. If traffic levels are about even, say, a regional ISP with a neigbouring regional ISP, they will just deal with traffic directed at each other for free.
But that only connects you to the next ISP, not to the whole internet, to get at the whole internet you peer with a tier-1 provider, people who run connections to IXPs all over the world so you can reach all. They're going to want money for that, and they're going to bill by maximum upstream bandwidth you sent out to the internet you used in that month^1^.
If you're an ISP that's generally fine, you're getting money from your customers, if you're a company with a webserver that's also fine, bandwidth isn't that expensive. If you're someone who puts petabytes on the pipes though, that includes the likes of netflix, you want to do something different: You want a box at every IXP that caches content so you can peer with those regional ISPs directly. That's also generally for free because while you're sending a lot of data, hooking up directly to you means that the ISP won't have to pay their tier-1 provider for the upstream part of the connection (there's always ack packages etc) and it's not like the total amount of traffic they're dealing with increases, it only shifts. Historically that has been akamai, the original peering slut (peers with everyone as long as they're sober), now there's a gazillion of CDNs and content providers like netflix which run their own CDNs.
The only ones complaining about that are tier1 providers which are also ISPs because they'd rather have all those CDNs pay them for using their fibre than not use their fibre and make things more efficient. They're rent seeking. And ISPs who want to triple-dip and have you pay by volume, which noone on the internet pays for.
Oh: What you pay your ISP for is a line and share of a port to the IXP, its maintenance, and your share in what they're shelling out to their tier-1 provider(s) for the stuff you upload into the wider net. Which is btw why asymmetric connections (higher download than upload bandwidth) make sense even if the underlying connection is symmetric: Provided the ISP's infrastructure is fast enough receiving more packets over their line only costs electricity, and a negligible amount thereof.
^1^ It's not "maximum" but "modulo 1% spike or something" don't ask me about the exact maths
Ah. I see. That's what's going on.