Comment by bauruine
3 days ago
They still pay for transit (Tier 1 providers) but they just refuse to pay for peering to eyeball ISPs. They just don't because they know if they are big enough the eyeball ISP is basically forced to offer them zero settlement (free) peering. If the ISP doesn't he has to pay for transit too and if there is some congestion in the path from the content provider to the ISP his customers are going to complain to the ISP that youtube is buffering and not to google. The content providers have a bigger lever so they don't pay.
Thanks. I think I have a better understanding now (those concepts like transit, peering are still hard to grasp for me as an outsider). Basically if you host content that many consumers want, you have leverage against ISPs?