(I'm reluctant to add to the noise, but what the hell - everyone else is partying :-) ) The space we are playing in is both a technical and an economic one, and the conversation stream to date veers widely around the technical issues and is completely off the planet economically speaking! Andrew half hit the issue with the comment relating to ISPs undertaking what is a variant of proxy aggregation to suppress routing table size when he noted that this is tantamount to "free transit". However this way he then inferred that free transit is impossible to sustain as the fatal flaw in this model, should be broken down further before dismissing it as completely flawed: a) forced proxy aggregation implies transit peering across ISPs Technically this (transit) is of course possible to construct. b) it will be economically infeasible IF we continue with this strange system of zero dollar interconnections we use as a peering model. i.e "free" is the problem here, not "transit". If you manage to provide a better model for interconnection which includes a rational economic model of interaction then, strangely enough, you then have a powerful tool you can use to address teh technical issue of scaling the routing domain. i.e. "free transit" is stupid, as Andrew indicates. "transit" is possible given a rational economic model of the transit interaction. In the same way that giving away IP addresses and giving away IP routing can only be described as a very bad case of irrational behaviour, especially when the underlying resource is under stress as it is at present, then I'd also note that giving away transit is similarly a case completely irrational behaviour! All this points to a desperate need for a more realistic economic structure to be used within a number of key aspects of Internet infrastructure. Thanks, Geoff Huston Andrew's comments:
Half correct. Everyone in the area carries full routes for the block. Everyone outside the area can listen to only the /8 advertisement.
So these providers are providing the free transit to their non-customers?
This does not make any business sense; it will not happen. --asp@uunet.uu.net (Andrew Partan)