[sgjohnson]

> Regulating peering within the EU would already be a win.

Regulating peering how? Freedom of commerce is one of the core pillars of the EU. Forcing a company to do business with another company is insanity.

If DTAG doesn't want to peer with CloudFlare, you can't force them.

[yayachiken]

DTAG are also a consumer ISP. A consumer ISP should be considered a utility, and utilities can also be forced to provide certain services. In addition, Internet Exchanges have become so critical for the Internet architecture that they should also have some privileged status.

Legislation could focus on the following general rules, without favoring some providers over the others:

* If you participate on an IX node, there is no reasonable technical or financial reason not to peer with the other participants at that node. Of course this would also mean that participants have to be protected against price-gouging of IXs when they need to scale up their uplink for that reason.

* Alternatively, you could conditionally allow paid peering, but in that case require certain availability guarantees on your general transit connection.

* If you do not want to do business with a certain party, it should be all or nothing. Blacklist them organization-wide. No misleading to consumers that a content provider just appears slow, announce that you do not want to play with e.g. Netflix anymore and if your customers do not like it, they will switch.

* If you want to opt out of all of this regulation, you are free to run fiber yourself and just directly connect with everybody you are interested in. That is expensive? Too bad.

[sgjohnson]

Letting the government regulate peering will be the death of the internet as we know it.

I don't believe that there's a single lawmaker, anywhere in the world, who understands anything about the fundamentals of IP transit. But no doubt they have ISP buddies who understand everything about it, and no doubt they'll be the ones actually writing the legislation.

[direwolf20]

WhatsApp has been required to provide an open API, Apple has been required to provide alternative app stores. Neither one has actually done it because the EU is too pussy to enforce the law, but the legislators clearly had no huge principle disagreement when writing these laws.

Mobile networks have been forced to allow roaming in other countries for a certain low fee, and that is actually enforced and has happened. It's clear the EU has no qualms about forcing companies to do business a certain way when it serves some greater interest.

[sgjohnson]

The difference between WhatsApp open API, alternative App Stores and forcing peering is that it costs virtually nothing for WhatsApp to provide an open API, and for Apple to allow alternative App Stores.

Roam-like-at-home is also not a particularly good comparison here, because the the roaming fees were basically a price gouging scheme.

Don't like DTAG? You're free to switch to another ISP.

[patrickmcnamara]

> Forcing a company to do business with another company is insanity.

This already happens all the time, and especially in telecommunications. Interconnection is a core of telecommunications law everywhere.