For example we do have some universities which have one upstream (us, ACOnet) and peerings with other ISPs (for whatever reason) _but no transit_ from them.
Some of them would be "visible" (e.g. those with legacy class B space), others would be proxy aggregated into our /15 and "disappear".
Which is fine. They are "public" in the sense that a "large" number of AS:es see them.
But, to come back to another comment: we're discussing details of routing configuration (because that's "easy"?) but I haven't seen any comment yet on my question on price/effort vs. (expected) result ratio (maybe because it's a bit more difficult? ;-).
I am not sure this has anything to do with routing configuration vs pricing. It has to do with application of AS-numbers and who are entiled to get/have one. - kurtis -