Peering Traffic Ratios as a Peering Discriminator present several problems that make them not business rational:

1.Dictating Peering Ratio requirements force non-competitors to build out into many interconnect regions (perhaps into your territories), to acquire (potentially your) local customer traffic from your market in order to meet your ratio requirements; essentially this requirements forces a peer to grow to look like you. So, you are creating a competitor.

2.Dictating Peering Ratio requirements ratios  encourage companies to “creatively route” your customers content or access traffic via sub-optimal and often circuitous routing in order to meet these arbitrarily set criteria. Sub optimal performance and customer complaints drive regulatory oversight.

3.Peering directly can increase revenue. Dave Rand (AboveNet) first made this argument to the author. When peering directly, routing generally prefers the direct path. The direct path is under the control of the two parties on either end so packet loss can be monitored and managed. The direct path is also generally a lower latency path. These two combine effects allow the TCP Window to grow faster and therefore more traffic flows between the customers on either side, which in turn, generates more revenue for the peering parties.