There are more costs involved than just those of the CDN. Let's say I'm a network operator. I have some number of POPs/facilities, peering relationships, trans

There are more costs involved than just those of the CDN. Let's say I'm a network operator. I have some number of POPs/facilities, peering relationships, transit customers maybe even some relationships where I pay for transit. If I decide to partner with or become a customer of a CDN who can control the path traffic takes to reach the CDN on my network, I/they/we can use that negate, or elminate, my transit costs AND drive revenue to me. (very simple example) Lets say one of my transit customers also has a non-paid peering relationship with one of my upstreams. Customer may choose to take the longer path to reach the CDN on my network because it's free to them, rather than paying me. Now, not only are they not paying me for transit, but I may be incurring additional cost to pay my transit. If this routing data is in the CDN application, a logical step is to report on costs of the traffic. I would see this traffic taking a more costly path and be able to act on it. Maybe that means pre-pending my ASN, maybe that means modifying the DNS requests made from my customer's IP range(s) to use a block not routed across the other ASN. Maybe it means I simply don't want that traffic to my "nodes" anymore. Maybe all anyone needs is "fast" today, I agree its not the only factor, but being able to manage cost was a discussion point in the past. EDIT: last line for clarity