A McDonalds analogy makes a certain amount of sense, but to make it work, McDonalds would have to be paying nothing to start with for their supplies. Then, the

A McDonalds analogy makes a certain amount of sense, but to make it work, McDonalds would have to be paying nothing to start with for their supplies. Then, the discounts McDonalds does get for buying in such high volume could be seen as "charging their suppliers". Normally, Comcast doesn't pay anyone to be able to serve their network traffic, so in that way they're like a McDonalds who doesn't pay for their supplies, and only acts as a middleman to give their suppliers a way to sell their buns or fries or whatever. So yes, I think you have the right idea. Also, ISPs have been peering both with one another and with others since the dawn of ISPs, as far as I can tell. Frankly, it is unfair, but it's been happening since the beginning. I don't honestly know how one would solve this imbalance - perhaps require ISPs to accept ALL peering requests? I don't know enough about networking to know if that would end well, but I suspect it wouldn't.