Re:Level3 is without peer, now what to do?
by Angostura on Tuesday May 20, 2014 @06:35PM
(#7775636)
Sorry to be dense, but it is not quite clear to me how ownership of the last mile affords such leverage. It would seem that if you need to buy bandwidth for end users, you would be negotiating transit like anyone else - I'm clearly missing something.
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Pay us $x to connect our network to Y network to your Z network, our our millions of Y users won't have access to customers on your Z network, and that will make the Z network look bad to your customers.
Of course, it goes the other way - Y looks bad because they can't get to Z's customers - but I suspect the commercial customers on Z might be more likely to ditch Z rather than the end users (who probably don't understand the situation) ditching Y.
> It would seem that if you need to buy bandwidth for end users, you would be negotiating transit like anyone else
It would sure seem that way, but the recent Comcast-Netflix deal shows that it isn't necessarily that way; big ISPs can exert enough pressure on content distributors to get the distributors to effectively pay the transit costs.