On Wed, 26 May 2004, Juha Saarinen wrote:
Matthew Poole wrote:
Xtra's customer base suddenly being unable to access TradeMe and NZDating would kill their helldesk.
Probably not. It's very hard for Joe and Joetta Dial-Up to figure out deliberately munted routing policy. They will assume that it's the Web site itself that's "slow and broken", or the network it is on. Said helldesk would be scripted to assign the blame elsewhere.
Yes, but said helldesk must first be contacted by Jo(e) User before they can play the scripted message. And it's those calls which would kill them. NZD has 250,000 accounts, TM is probably a lot more. Xtra will conservatively have 1/3 of the users of those, and TCL's stable probably about 1/5-1/4. Were those sites to just suddenly drop off the interweb, Jo(e)s' first reaction will be to whinge to the ISP that "that intarweb thingee" is broken. Nobody on this list under-estimates the lack of nous of the average user.
That's why refusing peering is powerful as a business lever. You decide who your end-users will do business with on the Interwebnet, basically.
Yes. But it cuts both ways, luckily, since neither TCL nor TCNZ has a disproprionate number of major clients. For its size, ICONZ seems to be doing quite well, and a few of the biggies are using international players to provide their connections. Were the weight firmly in the court of TCL or TCNZ, their threat to de-peer would be scary. But since things are distributed fairly evenly, a move by the rest of the ISP community to lock out the customers of TCL/TCNZ would carry a lot of force.