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Comment by phineyes | Hacker News Reader

This isn't unique to Vodafone. Google has also been slowly withdrawing from IXes globally in favor of PNIs and "VPPs" (verified peering providers). This only makes it harder for smaller networks to establish presence on the internet and feels pretty anti-competitive.

On the flip side, IXes are becoming harder and less desirable to participate in: port fees are going up, useful networks are withdrawing, low quality network participants are joining and widening blast radius. I'm not sure what the answer to this is, but this has not been a great year for the "open" internet.

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Google gave a presentation on this that I think is helpful context for "why": https://nanog.org/events/nanog-94/content/5452/

Direct YouTube link: https://youtu.be/Yg-qV6Fktjw

> low quality network participants are joining

(Genuinely curious because I truly don't know in this context) What is a low quality network participant? One of the "bulletproof" hosts?

Malware, flapping, bogons, remote peers, etc

I thought Google was _always_ like this. At least going back to 2015 when I left the ISP game, peering with them was notoriously difficult if you didn't have the traffic volumes required. Our network suffered from asynchronous routing to Google and Netflix for years because they refused to allow our routes despite checking all the boxes they require. Customers eventually left because other (larger) ISPs didn't have this issue.

I get why the enshittification of IXPs is occurring. Over the years many small and careless ISPs have caused issues for IXPs (and peers) based on what I've seen on mailing lists. It's hard work managing many hundreds or thousands of peers, let alone the equipment cost with multi-100Gbit ports becoming the norm for larger providers.

Why did your company expect Google to readily accept peering?

If there was such a large difference in volume they would be choosing to intentionally make it more difficult for themselves.

Google publishes a peering policy. It's reasonable to expect that they will peer with you if you hit all the requirements in the policy.

Afaik, their requirements have never been judgement based: just bandwidth minimums, port types and locations. I would expect that they prioritize new connections in some way, so if you barely hit the criteria and are somewhere well served by transit, you'll be low priority, and the requirements might change before your connection gets setup and if so, you might not get connected because you don't meet the new requirements, but otherwise, seems like if you meet the requirements, send in the application, and have some patience, the peering connection should turn up eventually.

It's not like they have a mostly balanced flows requirement like Tier 1 ISPs usually do. Also, even in their current peering policy, they don't require presence in multiple metros; just substantial traffic (10gbps), fast ports (100G), two pops in the same metro.

But it’s still Google’s choice?

They clearly didn’t publish a guarantee or an obligation that they will peer with anyone who meets the criteria.

Certainly, it's their choice. But I expect them to mostly follow through and peer with those networks that apply and meet their published requirements.

I know… I was the one who asked why that expectation formed…?

What sort of verification are they doing? Is this trend being pushed by the lack of proper security on BGP?

Notably, Chris Sacca (now a famous VC), when working at Google in the early 2000s, got in trouble for mentioning that telecoms were preventing Internet from being Net Neutral, and instead of being fired, he got promoted by Larry Page and given a huge budget to work on it. I can't find a reference but I'm almost certain this is correct.

> IXes are becoming harder and less desirable to participate in

Could this be due to the rise of services like Equinix Fabric and Inter.link? Google doesn't need to peer directly with most anymore because there is always a middleman somewhere who can handle it, and for many businesses the convenience of a point and click web gui outways whatever it costs?

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