e.g. how do you assign the traffic share of the traffic going to a smallish network which is multi-homed behind sprint, uunet, and which is also appears at mae-west? hint: if you look from a uunet or sprint perspective, then you assign it to uunet or sprint depending on perspective. but if you also peer openly at mae-west, then you don't assign it to either. If nothing else, a couple of well defined measures of market share would be quite useful, particularly if they were specified in such a way that they could be measured in a deterministic manner. However, as you point out this is essentially impossible, but I wouldn't characterize these as political, but rather as market issues.
i chose my example with care. it's a real problem. it is *extremely* hard to get a point of perspective where you can get a meaningful measurement. even the view from a widely-peered large provider (not a lot of those, eh?) is biased by the type of traffic that provider has. randy