Patrick Gilmore wrote: | Sean and Sprint still act publicly as if they are guardians of the route | table and without their wisdom and restraint, the rest of us would all die On the contrary, Sean has always maintained that the filtering was put in place to protect Sprint's customers from growth -- long-term or instant -- in the global routing system. The filters are an intelligent self-defence against misconfiguration, whether diffuse (across many ISPs) or localized (e.g. UUNET's de-aggregation). Limiting the number of prefixes one listens to must be done arbitrarily; one could draw the line in many different ways, and the way I chose was to draw it at the 18-bit level in what was then as-yet-unallocated address space. Moreover, when experience showed that when the filters were imposed people were actually using some of that address space, the filters were relaxed across that space. Even further, when, after vigorous discussion with several registries, it turned out that filtering anything longer than 18 bits was perhaps too harsh, the filters were further relaxed to something very much like what is in place now. That people other than Sprint and its immediate customers might benefit from a decision to limit the number of prefixes Sprint could hear from its non-customers was always a secondary motivation. Is there any particular reason why you keep banging on this drum this way? I don't understand why you are so frequently so thoroughly UNPLEASANT in your tone whenever you return to the issue, and I don't understand why you return to the issue with such frequency. Perhaps you might pause to reflect on that before people write you off entirely as a wingnut, and miss the occasional useful point you make (e.g., why isn't everyone filtering?) and the occasional useful response made in reply (e.g., Sprint is not the only network filtering at the /19 level across newer address space). Sean.