William Herrin wrote:
Right now we rely on ARIN and the RIRs to artificially suppress the growth of the prefix count and with it the availability of PI space. This is a Really Bad Thing on so many levels, but absent a viable market-based solution to the problem, authority-based rationing is really the only thing we can do.
If we can determine the cost to announce a prefix then we could develop a market-based solution to the problem... One where instead of suppressing the prefix count and dealing with it as business overhead, we GET PAID for announcing and propagating prefixes.
Hi, I'm Google/Yahoo/Microsoft/AT&T/AOL/Sprint/etc. and I plan to annnounce only /24's and I refuse to pay you to propagate those routes. Are you really going to drop those routes? Bottom line here is you're going to have trouble getting the big content providers to buy in, and you're going to have an equally tough time convincing the major carriers that they should essentially raise their rates for particular clients. So who exactly is going to pay and how are you going to convince them they should? If provider X tells me they're going to charge me $X per prefix I want them to propagate, I'll just go with provider Y. You're going to need 100% buy-in. Your solution here is merely a band-aid designed to disguise the actual problem. Growing prefix count is largely a symptom of missing BGP functionality. Fix or replace BGP in such a way that we can better control the flow of incoming traffic without needing hacks like announcing smaller subnets and prepending and the problem goes away without introducing extra fees and beauracracy like you're suggesting. Andrew Cruse