A market where one market participant can, well, force other market participants to carry their content free of charge sounds to me like a failed market. That’s why I asked whether regulation might be something to counter that.
I don’t know whether it is. I don’t even know if my assumptions are correct. Maybe this is no failed market at all and it’s just normal and good that ISPs have no-charge peering agreements with Google.
Sometimes a question is just a question and not some veiled attempt at taking a stand :)
That's not what's happening here at all. While Google might or might not have peering agreements in Europe like they do here in the US. Google isn't free loading anywhere. It either pays someone to carry it's traffic from it's data center to the next ISP or it already has that infrastructure and trades bandwidth on its network for traffic on the other ISP network. Since google bought a large chunk of dark fiber, they have lots of capacity and are making a sweet deal, it seems, to other ISP which allows them to pay nothing almost nothing for bandwidth except for the infrastructure.
What these ISP want is: when one of their customers wants to access a google site, google pays them for the traffic that goes over their network.
What doesn't make sense with that is that the traffic is already paid for twice, once with the customers subscription and another time before the data reaches this particulars ISP's network. (If google peers directly with them, they have some sort of deal currently, if the google doesn't then the ISPs inbetween already have a deal with this ISP for the traffic). In effect they are trying to find a way to charge another time for something that already paid for.
I don’t know whether it is. I don’t even know if my assumptions are correct. Maybe this is no failed market at all and it’s just normal and good that ISPs have no-charge peering agreements with Google.
Sometimes a question is just a question and not some veiled attempt at taking a stand :)