There’s a dispute going on right now between Comcast and Level3 Communications concerning the peering agreement between those two companies. Comcast says the dispute has nothing to do with the fact that Level3 just got the Netflix video streaming contract while most observers think that’s all it has to do with.

I think so, too.

Peering is at heart nothing but restraint of trade. Peering came about when various Internet backbone providers noticed they were all connected to the same big data centers and points of interconnection, normally inside telco central offices. Simply pulling an Ethernet cable from one rack to another could interconnect millions of users from two different backbone providers, saving time, distance, router hops […]