Internet Architecture Evolution and the Complex Economies of Content Peering

This paper will look at the operation and architecture of the Internet today and how economics have played a strong role in the evolution of the topology. Peering was intended as a reciprocal relationship between ISPs used for symmetric traffic exchange without fees being passed between peering partners. However, as transit fees grew due to increasing video traffic, asymmetric peering with content partners (known as "content peering") emerged as an alternative peering arrangement. Content peering relationships grew dramatically over the last several years and, as a result, transit expenses fell substantially from several hundred dollars to under $10 per Mbps today. While this peering provided temporary economic relief for ISPs the long term consequences were not anticipated. This paper makes the argument that large content providers have used their dominate traffic position (e.g. Google may represent 10-20% of transit traffic) to mandate content peering. ISPs faced with significantly increasing costs due to large volumes of content providers' traffic were compelled to accept asymmetric peering, where more content was sourced into their networks than was sourced by their networks. This asymmetric peering was positioned by content providers as mutually beneficial to the ISPs, but our analysis shows that the long term impact of content peering is negative for the ISPs.