The European Commission is considering new rules on how networks interconnect | Hacker News Reader

The European Commission is considering new rules on how networks interconnect

blog.cloudflare.com

33 pointspier258 comments

More backdoor censorship via artificiality imposed restrictions that also involve indirect taxation to fund it - just laying more foundation for 1984

By Big Telco I imagine they refer to ring companies like T-Mobile Vodafone. My understanding is that they are already paid by the end user [0] but want to be paid more for the incoming (video) traffic.

Cloudfpare claims that in the EU there are mostly two ways for them and Netflix to reach a user

1. Connect to a big exchange where every Telco is connected

2. Directly peer with the Telco at much higher prices

The thing I do not understand is why do Telcos accept lower prices from the exchange.

Is connectivity sold auction-, style? Could t-mobile decide to charge double [1] for use of its infrastructure?

Whatever it happening it is unclear to me why they happen to accept lower prices from one entry point and not another. Are these connections materially different?

[0] end user is well defined in the case of someone whatching Netflix.

[1] by net neutrality they cannot charge Netflix more, but they can charge everyone more.

> The thing I do not understand is why do Telcos accept lower prices from the exchange.

They are forced to, if they did not, their users would complain that the internet does not work.

I guess that they would mostly only have collective bargaining power not individual and to use it it might make them an illegal price-fixing cartel.

For reference the top 10 by Internet exchange point participation are:

ASN Name IXes

AS6939 Hurricane Electric LLC 290

AS13335 Cloudflare, Inc. 287

AS42 WoodyNet, Inc. 251

AS3856 Packet Clearing House, Inc. 250

AS15169 Google LLC 221

AS20940 Akamai International B.V. 202

AS8075 Microsoft Corporation 195

AS32934 Facebook, Inc. 184

AS16509 Amazon.com, Inc. 149

AS54113 Fastly, Inc. 125

Though I don't think this reflects the rank of overall importance to settlement-free transit, since a single settlement-free agreement with AT&T or Deutsche Telekom or China Telecom, etc., would be worth more then hundreds of agreements with smaller regional players.

Probably the importance of IXPs also follow a power-law distribution, with the top 100 exchanges combined seeing more traffic then the next 1000 combined.

Sorry for the editorialized title. The original title was way too long.

tl;dr Cloudflare and other Big Data companies want to continue parasitizing on telco companies

Its more like telcos want to be paid from both ends for the same data. They want subscriptions from their customers every month and then want tech companies to pay to send data.

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