advocates argue that Internet interconnection should work like international telephone interconnection, with each party paying half of the cost. Those who argue against ICAIS point out that much of the problem would be solved by building local exchange points. A significant amount of the traffic, it is argued, that is brought to the US and exchanged then leaves the US, using US exchange points as switching offices but not terminating in the US. In some worst-case scenarios, traffic from one side of a street is brought all the way to a distant exchange point in a foreign country, exchanged, and then returned to another side of the street. Countries with liberalized telecommunications and open markets, where competition between backbone providers occurs, tend to oppose ICAIS. See also Autonomous system Default-free zone Interconnect agreement Internet traffic engineering Net neutrality North American Network Operators' Group (NANOG) Vendor-neutral data centre References External links PeeringDB: A free database of peering locations and participants The peering Playbook (PDF): Strategies of peering networks Example Tier 1 Peering Requirements: AT&T (AS7018) Example Tier 1 Peering Requirements: AOL Transit Data Network (AS1668) Example Tier 2 Peering Requirements: Entanet (AS8468) Cybertelecom :: Backbones – Federal Internet Law and Policy How the 'Net works: an introduction into Peering and Transit, Ars Technica Internet architecture Net neutrality