Comcast was the first last mile provider to recognize this and move peering from the realm of network engineers to the MBAs and started systematically refusing to upgrade existing private interconnects and in some cases systematically de-peering in other cases. Comcast neatly side-stepped the entire net-neutrality debate by degrading service to everybody who wasn’t willing to pay for a private interconnect. Comcast has had a relatively free hand because their customers are blissfully unaware of the politics of global peering and instead will just go somewhere else when a website is ‘slow’.

This has put a lot of pressure on companies like Amazon who know that a 100ms delay in the order process can result in a 1% decrease in sales. Since private interconnect arrangements aren’t public my guess is a lot of companies have caved and are paying Comcast to »