From a letter I wrote to the Reg (in response to a post from Rishab Aiyer Ghosh):

a couple of years ago it was always indian ISPs that had to pay for access and didn’t get peering. now that the equation of revenue with bandwidth flow direction is pretty much reversed (i.e. india->us traffic actually implies more revenue to US sites, not just more demand from indians for them) there is a strong economic incentive for US companies to want traffic from india.

Even if Indian ISPs would like to charge for supplying traffic, they should _not_ be charging eBay et al — makes little sense: they should be approaching the carriers. I am pretty sure Ebay is not _dying_ to receive traffic from thousands of Indian users who drain bandwidth but hardly ever *buy* anything. Ditto the US operations of MSN and Yahoo. (Both have Indian operations — and I am pretty sure Yahoo India serves *it’s* content — including local ads — from Bombay.)

I wouldn’t be surprised, if, pretty soon, advertisers insisted on using RDNS lookups to only pay for users within specific geographic zones (for all I know, it could be happening already) — if I was advertising DIMMs on the Reg, I could say, I’ll only pay for hits from customers with the EU, US, and Canada. Or pay a lower rate for hits outside these zones. Some of this is already happening for some types of ads I’ve seen. This would kill Rishab’s argument that US sites see some perceived value from Indian traffic.