I thought Google was _always_ like this. At least going back to 2015 when I left the ISP game, peering with them was notoriously difficult if you didn't have the traffic volumes required. Our network suffered from asynchronous routing to Google and Netflix for years because they refused to allow our routes despite checking all the boxes they require. Customers eventually left because other (larger) ISPs didn't have this issue.

I get why the enshittification of IXPs is occurring. Over the years many small and careless ISPs have caused issues for IXPs (and peers) based on what I've seen on mailing lists. It's hard work managing many hundreds or thousands of peers, let alone the equipment cost with multi-100Gbit ports becoming the norm for larger providers.

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MichaelZuo 2 days ago | parent [-]

Why did your company expect Google to readily accept peering?

If there was such a large difference in volume they would be choosing to intentionally make it more difficult for themselves.

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toast0 2 days ago | parent [-]

Google publishes a peering policy. It's reasonable to expect that they will peer with you if you hit all the requirements in the policy.

Afaik, their requirements have never been judgement based: just bandwidth minimums, port types and locations. I would expect that they prioritize new connections in some way, so if you barely hit the criteria and are somewhere well served by transit, you'll be low priority, and the requirements might change before your connection gets setup and if so, you might not get connected because you don't meet the new requirements, but otherwise, seems like if you meet the requirements, send in the application, and have some patience, the peering connection should turn up eventually.

It's not like they have a mostly balanced flows requirement like Tier 1 ISPs usually do. Also, even in their current peering policy, they don't require presence in multiple metros; just substantial traffic (10gbps), fast ports (100G), two pops in the same metro.

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MichaelZuo 2 days ago | parent [-]

But it’s still Google’s choice?

They clearly didn’t publish a guarantee or an obligation that they will peer with anyone who meets the criteria.

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toast0 2 days ago | parent [-]

Certainly, it's their choice. But I expect them to mostly follow through and peer with those networks that apply and meet their published requirements.

	▲	MichaelZuo a day ago \| parent [-]
		I know… I was the one who asked why that expectation formed…?