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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

One thing I was wondering, beyond your own personal ISP, does this mean that the backbone providers, the Level 3's of the world, are going to get into selling data to advertisers? I was feeling personally ok because I use an ISP with a strong privacy pledge, but I wonder if their uplink is going to be selling my data. Though I guess it's less of a concern since the backbones don't have the complete personally identifying info that the customer ISPs have.

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What incentive does a tier-1 provider have to collect data from their clients? Keep in mind their customers are not individuals, but large orgs: data-centers, corporations, office-buildings, universities, et al. They lack the strong correlation of "1 IP" => "1 customer" that a residential ISP tends to enjoy; they also lack the storage infrastructure that an AMZN, GOOG, MSFT, et al. tend to have as a function of doing business. (Since the problem tier 1 providers aim to solve tends to require large workingsets, not large datasets at rest per se, they tend to need RAM more than durable storage.) I imagine the infrastructure needed upstream to track such traffic would be immense & costly, and more importantly it would just not be very applicable to the provider's major product offering.

Furthermore just what would their end game be? Per all the DOCSIS whitepapers I've read: my residential ISP intends to sell me any number of "over the top" services: a plethora of cable channels, their own streaming services, VoIP, alarm systems, whole home DVR, etc. There is a lot of money to be made there in terms of equipment rental, upkeep, and paid programming. More importantly most of it goes right into their pockets. The way I see it, it's not about selling the data, it's about using it themselves.

Compare that to a tier-1 provider who has one job: get a drop to my network fabric. Their business revolves around (A) doing that regionally, (B) maintaining good peering, and (C) being extremely competent network engineers. As I see it a tier 1 provider has far less incentive to spy on their users compared to a residential ISP. This doesn't obviate the need for caution of course, since nation-state level actors have all the more reason to spy on tier-1 providers simply due to the volume of traffic that can be intercepted.

If I was a betting man - backbone providers don't do this (sell to advertisers).

It would be costly to maintain the interception/analysis infrastructure required for such data collection.

I daresay it would cost more than what they would make off the data.

Thats an interesting bet. If they isolated to the subnets they sell off to ISPs (i.e exclude datacenters and such) what do you think would contribute to the cost/benefit difference of the two?

That is still a significant amount of traffic to analyze and store data for.

I don't want to speculate further as I don't know what margins for transit providers in NA look like.

Frankly I'm surprised they aren't doing this already.

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