Mike,
It seems to me they get paid to carry prefixes by their customers.
And their peers listen to the prefixes because they make money by using those prefixes.
I'm sure this type of statement helps drug dealers to sleep at night! :-) If the top 100 AS's de-aggregated and increased the routes they announce by 6000 each would we be so content?
However, if you are the one filtering and all your competitors figure out how to handle 154,000 routes then you will be at a competitive disadvantage.
But its not just 154,000 routes though is it?! If we all start doing this at a much increased rate [as we've seen in recent times] then it will be more like 1,540,000 routes. When we cleaned the issue from 8220 we found that a lot of the issues were config issues and ancient history transient workarounds for problems that were not fixed after the event. The issue we see is bad aggregation - the root cause is bad practise and processes that manifest into bad aggregation. I would argue that networks with poor aggregation are also networks that will tend to have more routeing issues and other outages although I have no data to back that claim up.
Coincidentally, the largest networks also spend the most with their vendors and get to tell the vendors what they want in the next generation of boxes they buy.
And look how well that's worked out not notably on this issue. Regards, Neil.