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That's what I thought I was paying for when I agreed to give my service provider money.



No it's not. You pay to send to them, and to receive data people send to you. You don't pay for your ISP to transit data from whoever is sending you data.

For example, you want to download something off a Server in Germany. Your ISP is responsible for getting your initial message to the server. But it's not responsible for taking that information in Germany and carrying to back to the US for you. The Server's ISP has to carry it to the USA and then dump it off at your local ISP.

Now your ISP and the Server ISP may have a peering point in Germany, but they might not. But either way, your ISP isn't under any obligation to pay for transit of data being sent to you. That's just not how it works. And that definitely isn't what is in your agreement with your ISP.




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