The "All German Internet" plan was an attempt to extract money out of service providers in Germany. There are strong peering interconnects in Germany, most not

The "All German Internet" plan was an attempt to extract money out of service providers in Germany. There are strong peering interconnects in Germany, most notably DE-CIX (AFAIK the largest interconnect world-wide). Who's not present there? Telekom. There are two ways to connect with our beloved former monopolist (who still captures a significant part of the market through inertia): Either you peer directly (and they have rather arcane and costly ideas about what that means, and where the pipe goes to that you will be leasing), or you go through one of the international backbone providers that are too big for Telekom to ignore. Which is why communication with Telekom customers from the outside (data centers in Germany, other ISPs) tends to cross the Atlantic twice. Telekom's PR attempt was mostly targetted at politics to try to get them to pressure other internet infrastructure companies to pay up for direct peering with Telekom. Here's what DE-CIX had to say about it (German only, they don't seem to have translated that particular press release, obviously biased): http://presse.de-cix.net/press-releases/pressemitteilung/article/nationales-routing-de-cix-laedt-deutsche-telekom-an-den-verhandlungstisch/ http://presse.de-cix.net/press-releases/pressemitteilung/art...