Thus spake "Stephen Griffin" <stephen.griffin@rcn.com>
These companies, conversely, don't care about the costs that _every other BGP speaker in the default-free zone_ has to incur as a direct result of their actions. Who is expected to bear the cost, the one or the many?
There is a cost associated with each AS connecting to the Net; if you want your customers to have access to every AS, you will accept all _reasonable_ advertisements. One prefix per AS is certainly more reasonable than common practice -- just look at The Cidr Report.
That ISP is less likely to have any successful litigation against it through sticking to their policy. Converse to your argument, ISP helpdesks could point their customers to call the company's helpdesk for failure to properly announce their address space.
Define "properly." The companies in question are different legal entities, operating in different countries, with no common ISPs, and no direction connection to each other. By definition, they are two different AS's with two different prefixes and two different routing policies. There is no valid way for these two companies to collectively announce a single route.
As the routing table size continues to increase, the number of entities who filter will increase, especially those who could better spend the upgrade costs on direct revenue generation.
History has shown the reverse to be true.
While it may never happen in my lifetime, full-scale IPv6 deployment will undoubtedly make filtering an absolute requirement.
Anyone who doesn't already filter extensively is an AS7007 waiting to happen.
Now we've moved from the hypothetical to the nasty. I think the community is better served with an open and frank discussion on prefix filters, what is reasonable, and technical solutions to the issues or non-issues cited.
Citing "technical reasons" for excessive filtering but allowing exceptions for your own customers is clearly hypocritical. It's either a technical problem or it's not. Consistency is the issue, not the theoretical limits of the routing system. S