SBC/AT&T + Verizon/MCI Peering Restrictions

Mailman List Mirror (Read Only)
1

Any thoughts on this:

http://www.convergedigest.com/Bandwidth/newnetworksarticle.asp?ID=16437

--- <snip>
The applicants committed, for a period of three years, to maintain
settlement-free peering arrangements with at least as many providers of
Internet backbone services as they did in combination on the Merger Closing
Dates.

The applicants committed for a period of two years to post their peering
policies on publicly accessible websites. During this two-year period, the
applicants will post any revisions to their peering policies on a timely
basis as they occur.
---- </snip>

Published SFI peering policies are nice, but the overlap in SFI peering
between each pair of merging carriers may require them to peer with
additional networks. For example, there is some overlap between SBC and AT&T
in regards to SFI peers. This might require the combined network to
interconnect with additional networks to MAINTAIN the overall number of SFI
peers.

I guess its a good time to apply to 701 for SFI, although it appears the
number of slots are limited to some unknown (and probably low) number.
Gentlefolk, start your engines :slight_smile:

Can anyone else think of regulatory restrictions previously placed on SFI
relationships in North America? I realize this is more like a consent decree
than true regulation, but its an interesting move by the regulators.

Regulation is generally a bad thing, but publishing SFI requirements - and
even SFI relationships - won't hurt anyone, IMHO.

2

the two year window is far too low given the sbc ceo's recent public
statements on the use of his wires by google and the like.

randy

3

Should content suppliers be required to provide equal access to all
networks? Or can content suppliers enter into exclusive contracts?

If Google sets up a WiFi network in San Francisco or buys AOL with
Comcast, can Google create a custom content for users on its networks? Or
must Google offer the same cotent on the same terms and conditions to
everyone? Should AOL be able to offer selected content to only its
customers, such as music downloads? Or must AOL supply that content
to everyone equally? Comcast offers its users access to the Disney
Connection web site, should Disney be required to offer it to all Internet
users equally? The NFL offers its Sunday Ticket exclusively through
DirecTV? Or must the NFL offer the same content to every network?

What rules should exist on how Google operates? Or is it just
traditionally lobbying? Google says regulate the other guy, but
not itself. The other guys say regulate Google, but not them.

4

the two year window is far too low given the sbc ceo's recent public
statements on the use of his wires by google and the like.

Should content suppliers be required to provide equal access to all
networks? Or can content suppliers enter into exclusive contracts?

the content providers are not common carriers whose irreplacable
access to the customer prem was subsidized by public funding and
protection.

and perhaps we should be declaring our employment affiliations.
mine is iij, a large japanese/asian non-carrier isp with some
service in the us, plus various consulting gigs, none for content
providers.

randy

5

You can pretty much s/the sbc/rboc/g in this context. Leadership seems to believe that because those who conduct business over ‘their’ infrastructure aren’t paying them a transaction fee, there’s somehow something wrong with that model. Fact is, they are getting paid for their pipes, and they’ve never been part of the transaction model (aka tax collectors). If you want to be something else, dump the pipes r us business model. But then you can’t have your cake and eat it, too. Somehow, I’m very reminded of how the music industry has acted when faced with a disruptor. Very classic threat reponse of somebody thinking like a mono/duo/whateverpartitionedmarketpoly. Sections in
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/business/2005-10-31-bellsouth-mergers_x.htm have publically confirmed similar thought patterns. But then again, the CEO’s of the companies mentioned here do look like twins separated at birth, with companies sharing very similar DNA (even though they all think they’re very different).

So, my point being in response to what Randy wrote… expect a lot more where that came from, especially as margins come under more pressure. As long as they pretend disruption can be controlled or isn’t happening, this will continue. And one could argue that the recently approved mergers might fuel such attitudes.

Best regards,
Christian

6

if i am a paying sbc or other foopoloy voice customer, and i
place a voice call to aunt tillie, does aunt tillie pay sbc
to hold up her end of the conversation?

if i am a paying sbc or other foopoloy dsl customer and i go
to <http://content.provider>, why should content.provider pay
to give the sbc paying customer what they're already charged
for?

what these greedy <bleep>s want it a way to double bill.
your analogy to the riaa/mpa desperation is apt.

randy

7

> the two year window is far too low given the sbc ceo's recent public
> statements on the use of his wires by google and the like.

Should content suppliers be required to provide equal access to all
networks? Or can content suppliers enter into exclusive contracts?

equal access at same cost perhaps... though honestly it's their content so
they can decide if they don't want one or some folks to view it I'd think.
(ianal, of course)

If Google sets up a WiFi network in San Francisco or buys AOL with
Comcast, can Google create a custom content for users on its networks? Or

this is a 'customer portal' no? Don't lots of folks do this today? to
provide customized content to their subscribers, somehow wrapping that
cost into the cost of the network service they offer?

must Google offer the same cotent on the same terms and conditions to
everyone? Should AOL be able to offer selected content to only its
customers, such as music downloads? Or must AOL supply that content
to everyone equally? Comcast offers its users access to the Disney

aol/google/content-provider-foo might provide exclusive content for a
higher (or lower) price than to normal folks, it also might be bitten by
the lose of potential customers that way :frowning: This sounds like a business
decision not a legislative one, eh?

Connection web site, should Disney be required to offer it to all Internet
users equally? The NFL offers its Sunday Ticket exclusively through
DirecTV? Or must the NFL offer the same content to every network?

no one cares about football... Now, hockey! That's a sport that everyone
should get access to! :slight_smile:

What rules should exist on how Google operates? Or is it just
traditionally lobbying? Google says regulate the other guy, but
not itself. The other guys say regulate Google, but not them.

Isn't this just the normal political/regulator/lobbyist dance? Those with
the slickest, loudest, most-involved lobbyists 'win' in the end don't
they? Take Disney's constant push to up the Copyright timeframes for
example...

-Chris

8

For the curious on the list...

"How do you think they're going to get to customers? Through a broadband
pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to
do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we
have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going
to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for
the portion they're using. Why should they be allowed to use my pipes?

The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies
have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! or Vonage or anybody to
expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!"

- Ed Whitacre, CEO of SBC

9

if i am a paying sbc or other foopoloy voice customer, and i
place a voice call to aunt tillie, does aunt tillie pay sbc
to hold up her end of the conversation?

No, but they pay their local carrier. And somewhere there's an IXC in the middle. And settlement happens. Access charges, LD charges and all. Hell, they even bill their customers on behalf of all those other guys. And they all want access charges (remember the fights a few years back?), and then they want a cut what goes over the pipe which the access charges just enabled. And I stand here shaking my head, going blblblblblb, wtf.

All because they don't want and can't (sic) accept that the pipes r us business has been commoditized and evolution must happen for them to get money out of other services.

Now, if they made bw free, and wanted a cut from the transaction.. I don't think anyone would object. Pull up the recent balance sheets and see how much money you'd have to make up to cover the gap. Ooof.

if i am a paying sbc or other foopoloy dsl customer and i go
to <http://content.provider>, why should content.provider pay
to give the sbc paying customer what they're already charged
for?

That's my precisely my point as well. It's nutty. There are several people reading along here who saw first hand with me what sort of curious models this brought to light..

what these greedy <bleep>s want it a way to double bill.
your analogy to the riaa/mpa desperation is apt.

Thanks. And tomorrow we'll all wonder out loud why all these guys haven't been poaching customers in the other's backyard thus far in what's basically been a decade now since 1996, in spite of having hardly any regulatory restraints placed on them (about which they bitch so loudly at home).

:wink:

Best regards,
Christian

10

aol/google/content-provider-foo might provide exclusive content for a
higher (or lower) price than to normal folks, it also might be bitten by
the lose of potential customers that way :frowning: This sounds like a business
decision not a legislative one, eh?

Connection web site, should Disney be required to offer it to all Internet
users equally? The NFL offers its Sunday Ticket exclusively through
DirecTV? Or must the NFL offer the same content to every network?

no one cares about football... Now, hockey! That's a sport that everyone
should get access to! :slight_smile:

<insert tongue in cheek here>

I, for one, welcome Christopher Morrow, and Sean Donelan as my new monopoly overlords. I'd like to remind him that as a trusted former associate/acquaintance, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.

  </insert tongue in cheek here>

And yes, it has been done to death... I am not proud...

11

Hah. Classic. But, but, Dan, that trick-or-treating wasn't all. But if they harness their own content, then what would you have.. a captive supplier to an mono/whateverpoly? Oh what fun that would be for Christmas, on a one horse open sleigh. 'Tis the season, guys. Ho Ho Ho.

http://www.cabledatacomnews.com/nov05/nov05-6.html

You've got to admit, though, the ability to completely fade out reality and invent your own is impressive, and those CEO's ought to be commended.

And while we're doing this with RBOCs, we can bitch about MSOs just the same. One might find a surprising number of similarities.

Best regards,
Christian

12

There is one scenario where the content.provider is
paying the carrier as well - when the content.provider
is a direct customer of the carrier, rather than being
either a SFI-peer or a customer of an SFI-peer.

This of course goes back to the question of
depeering/transit/etc which we beat to death a couple
of weeks ago - many carriers want to get paid both by
the sources and sinks of traffic (it's certainly an
understandable, if unlikely, desire). I would just
like to point out for the record that none of the
recent depeering battles have involved any RBOCs...

-David Barak

13

Sean Donelan wrote:

Should content suppliers be required to provide equal access to all
networks? Or can content suppliers enter into exclusive contracts?

SBC and Yahoo! have already answered this question (for example).

I also think that most people on this list will remember the early days of
broadband suppliers like RoadRunner who tried to build a "we are mostly
local content, plus some Internet access" model which the customers hated,
and they (for the most part) eventually abandoned altogether. Even AOL was
forced by market pressure to provide real Internet to its customers.

Doug .oO(Glad I don't own any SBC stock ...)

14

Come on, you didn't see that coming? I'd wager money that right now,
somewhere at SBC, there are two executives in a board room with arms
interlocked at the elbow, skipping merrily in a circle with giant grins
on their faces, chanting:

o/~ We're gonna be a tier 1 o/~
o/~ We're gonna be a tier 1 o/~

15

There is one scenario where the content.provider is
paying the carrier as well - when the content.provider
is a direct customer of the carrier, rather than being
either a SFI-peer or a customer of an SFI-peer.

This of course goes back to the question of
depeering/transit/etc which we beat to death a couple
of weeks ago - many carriers want to get paid both by
the sources and sinks of traffic (it's certainly an
understandable, if unlikely, desire). I would just
like to point out for the record that none of the
recent depeering battles have involved any RBOCs...

Playing devil's advocate here...

But what if (assuming a new generation of peering agreements came into being)...

They allowed SELECTIVE depeering... say... by Customer?

So SBC could depeer Google...

(assume here the SBC wants Google to become a customer and isn't actually competing with Google as an SE guy).

And assume that the FCC/Courts will take a few years to deal with the issue.

I think it might be able to happen. What would a Google do? Anywhere it moves its bits, SBC would just drop them/ignore them. SBC is running a private network with some interconnections as far as SBC is concerned, and barring any wild lawsuits from customers and assuming an amendment to its TOS... You could selectively depeer BIG guys... that aren't SO big that your customers will mass defect..

So maybe Google isn't the right example. Maybe real.com is a better one. Would you lose many customers if real.com wasn't available to them? I bet not. But would real be willing to pay you $4K a month to keep access to your network??? probably.

Just a thought.

Deepak

16

Sean Donelan wrote:

Should content suppliers be required to provide equal access to all
networks? Or can content suppliers enter into exclusive contracts?

Erm .. the content 'belongs' to the supplier, why shouldn't they be allowed to chose who can and can't get access to it.

The electronic retailer I work for deny access to all content that they own/supply to several networks, as a matter of policy. Noone should be able to tell us that we have to start supplying it. We also give some third-parties more content based on commercial relationships in place.

Similarly, google own all of the data that they've crawled/indexed/archived - why shouldn't they be able to hold that data to ransom.

Why shouldn't google be able to supply extra content to networks that it runs ?

[...]
> What rules should exist on how Google operates? Or is it just
> traditionally lobbying? Google says regulate the other guy, but
> not itself. The other guys say regulate Google, but not them.

So google charge for their data (either by subscription, or forcing users to join GoogleNet to get access to what they want). Fine. If Google do, someone else will be perfectly willing to crawl/index/archive a new set of data. And many webmasters will be quick to deny access to google's spider.

-a

17

That's a wonderful bluring of what Randy's issue was to the point of
indistinction. Yes, try to flip it. The issue is when a consumer buys
access to the "Internet" what do they get?

One way of tackling this is a truth in advertising defintion of what
selling access to the "Internet" means.

If you sell access to the "Internet" does that mean everybody except
companies that offer services that compete with you? (for example:
competing VOIP for phone companies, or competing IPTV for cable networks)

Does access to the "Internet" include prefixes of:

* prefixes of networks willing to pay you money

* prefixes of networks willing to call it even

* prefixes of networks that wanted you to pay money

At some point, what you would be selling would not be access to what the
average business customer or consumer would call the "Internet", in which
case you shouldn't be allowed to market it that way. You should have to
call it access to the "Partial Internet", or "Some of the Internet", or
"The portion of the Internet willing to pay us money". i.e. "Contains
only 50 percent Internet". (heh, just like a can of mixed nuts letting
you know the amount of peanuts, or "fruit juice" that discloses whether it
really has any fruit juice in it at all.)

Most of us can probably agree that you should be free to sell whatever
concontion of network connectivity you want. Certainly AOL, Compuserve,
and Prodigy were all walled gardens before the Internet. Knock yourself
out, just don't call it Internet access.

Mike.

> the two year window is far too low given the sbc ceo's recent public
> statements on the use of his wires by google and the like.

Should content suppliers be required to provide equal access to all
networks? Or can content suppliers enter into exclusive contracts?

If Google sets up a WiFi network in San Francisco or buys AOL with
Comcast, can Google create a custom content for users on its networks? Or
must Google offer the same cotent on the same terms and conditions to
everyone? Should AOL be able to offer selected content to only its
customers, such as music downloads? Or must AOL supply that content
to everyone equally? Comcast offers its users access to the Disney
Connection web site, should Disney be required to offer it to all Internet
users equally? The NFL offers its Sunday Ticket exclusively through
DirecTV? Or must the NFL offer the same content to every network?

What rules should exist on how Google operates? Or is it just
traditionally lobbying? Google says regulate the other guy, but
not itself. The other guys say regulate Google, but not them.

+----------------- H U R R I C A N E - E L E C T R I C -----------------+

18

Certainly AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy were all walled gardens before
the Internet.

Before in the sense of before they connected to it. (not literally of
course)

+----------------- H U R R I C A N E - E L E C T R I C -----------------+

19

That's a wonderful bluring of what Randy's issue was to the point of
indistinction. Yes, try to flip it. The issue is when a consumer buys
access to the "Internet" what do they get?

for some help, see rfc 4084, though it is weak in the area of
interest.

randy

20

if i am a paying sbc or other foopoloy voice customer, and i
place a voice call to aunt tillie, does aunt tillie pay sbc
to hold up her end of the conversation?

Historically, aunt tillie's residential telephone line was
subsidized by charging more for business lines. When you called
aunt tillie, a portion of what you paid for the call passed through
settlement charges and access fees to compensated both your service
provider and aunt tillie's service provider for the call.

These were usually implemented for social policy reasons, and its
been a slow process to re-allocate the various billing practices to
eliminate them. Aunt tillie saw it mostly as her local phone bill
increased as she lost the benefit of the subsidy.

if i am a paying sbc or other foopoloy dsl customer and i go
to <http://content.provider>, why should content.provider pay
to give the sbc paying customer what they're already charged
for?

When aunt tillie watches a home shopping channel, the channel
usually gives a percentage of everything aunt tillie buys from
the channel to the local cable operator. When aunt tillie watches
basic cable channels, usually the channel gives the local cable
operator several minutes of advertising time every hour, even though
aunt tillie already paid for her cable. When aunt tillie calls
a toll-free (1-800) number, the business answering the call pays
for the call including the settlement and access charges for
aunt tillie's service provider in addition to the business' service
provider. Google pays compensation to some web sites to include
"sponsored" links on their web pages.

Why do businesses do this? Some believe it benefits advertisers to
subsidize consumers basic cable, toll-free phone access and web sites
so more consumers have access to their content, and in turn gives
businesses a bigger market to sell too.

Why would you want to prevent businesses from paying for part of
aunt tillie's Internet access? If a business wants to pay for "better
than best effort" access for users coming to its web site or using
some other service such as VOIP, shouldn't it have that option?