I beg to differ...
c/o Tony Bates, UU are only kept off the top spot by Telstra's apparent policy of deaggregating!
I don't speak for UUNET, not a shareholder, don't have any say over their routing policies; that said, there are a couple reasons that might be the case: 1. Deaggregation to help spread out traffic flow. As someone who used to send a lot of traffic toward some big providers, it can be hard to balance traffic efficiently when all you get is one short prefix at multiple peering points. Having more-specifics, and possibly even MEDs that make sense, can help with decisions regarding which part of a /9 can be reached best via which peering point. (And that's peering as in BGP, not peering as in settlements.) 2. Cut-outs for those pesky dot-coms; you know, the ones with the most compelling content on the Internet jumping up and down in your face with a need to multi-home their /24 to satisfy the crushing global demand for such essentials as "the hamster dance." I can easily imagine that when you have a lot of customers (as UUNET is purported to have), you'd have the above two situations in spades, plus more that we'll no doubt discuss at great length for the next week. Let's consider the converse, though - what if AS701 were to suddenly become a paragon of routing table efficiency, and collapse all their announcements into one (not possible, I know, but indulge me, please)? First, some decrease in revenue because all the more-specifics for multi-homed customers would be preferred over the one big AS701 announcement. Second, a traffic balancing nightmare as everyone who touches AS701 in multiple places tries to figure out how to deliver traffic to AS701 efficiently. While Tony's report certainly indicates that things could be better, it is also true that they could be a lot worse. Stephen