Yeah, the idea is idiotic. You blow up the NEO. Wonderful. The million pieces still have the same mass, velocity and therefore kinetic energy heading towards the planet.

You don't blow up threatening space objects. Space is really big. All you do is give the object a little nudge while it's still far enough away. The little nudge is all it takes to miss the planet by a very large margin.

That would be MLPA, not MPLA. Sometimes I wonder if I'm dyslexic.

Verizon doesn't have any paid transit at all. They have only peers and customers. They're one of a handful of "transit-free" backbone networks, sometimes mislabelled as "tier 1."

Verizon refused to upgrade the network ports with the peer serving Netflix. They let it congest until Netflix's service stopped working (along with everything else via that peer). They then kindly offered to let Netflix pay for a direct connection.

You don't think that's throttling and paid prioritization?

Right. Regional monopoly/duopoly ISPs have the power to compel double-billing, in which they collect money from two different customers for each packet that transits their network. This "saves" them a considerable amount of money.

Well, that's the big ISP's big lie anyway. In reality "traffic ratios" are an excuse for the "eyeball" networks (those serving consumers) to peer with each other while somehow justifying a refusal to peer with the "content" networks (those providing the movies, web pages and other content consumed).

Many networks do settlement-free peering with each other without any traffic ratios. Indeed, a shocking number of folks find it convenient to peer with google despite the lopsided ratio.

They offered to peer. TWC refused. Game, set, match.

There's a little nuance, but that's basically correct: TWC should have to do this for anyone who asks.

Nuance:

Peer where? TWC gets to pick the location and it isn't fair to require TWC to pay to connect from that location to yours. That's an expense you either pay for or negotiate.

Peer with how much of TWC's network? We're not talking about a single city here, TWC serves many mainland communities and large swaths of Hawaii too. Even if you connect at their favored location, should they be required to shuttle your packets around the globe? Probably not. They can probably establish multiple peering points and decide that unless it benefits them to enlarge it, a connection at that peering point is only good for that portion of their network.

Who pays the setup costs? Core routers are expensive beasts. Some cost half a million dollars or more. Should TWC be compelled to eat the port cost for everybody who wants to peer? Probably not. It's probably appropriate to expect a would-be peer to reimburse TWC for reasonable, direct costs associated with the initial setup of a peering link.

Almost none of the public peering points employ multilateral peering agreements (MPLAs). Instead, you sit on the same ethernet switch that they do but must then negotiate a unilateral peering agreement with each network willing to peer.

A few smaller networks have "open" peering agreements. This means they'll accept an offer to peer with anyone else connected to the switch. Most have closed peering agreements, which means that the peer must meet some arbitrary criteria or they won't talk with you via the peering switch.

There are a few MPLA peering points out there. For example, DR Fortress in Honolulu has a multilateral peering service where all participants agree to trade Hawaii-local traffic with all other participants.

Wah! I'm an idiot who doesn't understand the difference between Transit (uplink) and peering and can't be bothered to learn.

Nonsense. Small networks frequently peer with each other, even as they're locked out of peering in the big boys' club. And for your information, the arbitrary and capricious standards for joining the boys' club IS one of the worst excesses and abuses of the companies that hold hostage the future of our information based economy.

Peering only connects you to the other network's customers, not to the Internet at large.

You'd still have to pay someone to connect you to the other 99% of the Internet.

You'd still have to pay for the network line that connects your house to the location where your ISP does its peering.

Compulsory peering just means that when your ISP's customers have paid for access to "the Internet" and you offer to provide the ISP a direct connection to your part of "the Internet," the ISP has an obligation to service its paid customers in the best way possible: by accepting your offer to directly connect.

And before you ask what's to stop everybody from declaring themselves a peer, think about it for a minute. The ISP's peers can't talk to each other via the ISP. They're not paying customers. Peering requires one of the endpoints in any packet flow to have paid the ISP for access to the Internet.

While at the same time going out of their way to speed up any company's traffic who pays them (including offering to speed up this company's for the right fee). Paid prioritization and throttling are two sides of the same coin. Either violates net neutrality.

It's always cheaper for the ISP to send and receive a third party's packets via a network that's paying them than via a network which isn't. Indeed, it has a -negative- cost.

Here's where the line should be drawn: if I'm willing to pay your direct costs for establishing a peering connection to me, that is I bring a line to a location you find convenient, pay reasonable equipment costs and pay for a couple of hours of your engineers' time, and you still say no peering then you've breached network neutrality.

There's a couple nuances to that which I'm skipping for the sake of clarity, but in large there it is.

I stand by my record. Better part of a decade as the technical lead of a regional Internet Service Provider. Frequent participant in the North American Network Operators Group. Participant in the Internet Research Task Force's Routing Research Group.

There are perhaps 100 people in the world who know these issues as well as or better than I do. You are not one of them.

Close but not quite.

Internet customer: someone who pays me to connect them to "the Internet"

Transit provider: Someone I pay to connect me to "the Internet"

Peer: Any network with whom I agree to trade packets from my own network and my Internet customers, to his network and Internet customers, and vice versa. Put another way: we agree to trade packets only for which our respective customers have paid us to transmit or receive them. Sometimes called "settlement free peering."

You'll sometimes hear the term "paid peering" but that's actually Transit above that the Internet customer chooses to use a particular way.

BGP peer: any connection between Internet networks which uses BGP, whether customer, transit or "peer." Not relevant to this discussion, but I call it out to keep the term from creeping in as if it was the same thing as "peering."

Peering is most definitely a net neutrality issue. When one network refuses to peer with another, they force the other network to either take the long way around (throttling) or to pay for transit service (paid prioritization).

There's room for nuance here. There's no suggestion that one network must peer in exactly the manner another wants to. Or that one network must pay the direct costs of connecting with another just because the other wants to. But a flat refusal to peer based on some arbitrary and capricious measurement of the other network's nature is most emphatically a net neutrality violation.