I think everyone at one point or another has tried to influence incoming data flows via BGP. About the only tool available to influence the BGP decisions in far away places is via AS-PATH length. This turns out to be a fairly never-ending iterative process - that at best achieves 80% of its intention. It also doesn't allow for accurate decision making. As an alternative, neighboring ISPs and their customers usually design some BGP community system which is then used to influence the BGP decision process. Why can't this be extended globally [if this has already been done and written up in some BCP RFC - just point it out to me]? What if we all agreed that if some community value of say 1000000-2000000 [example] is seen, then those community values are to take precedence above all other metrics. 1000001 could mean - "this is the best path for me - always send pkts this way no matter what the other metrics might say". We could build up a table of these global community strings. ISPs that don't use it - no harm done. But the more ISPs (tier 1 & 2) that do use it - the better the end customer and ISPs have on influencing data flow. Comments welcome. Hank Nussbacher