Alan Hannan writes:
[Alexis writes:]
It's a really bad decision. It saves the cost of hiring a real engineer, but who wants to see a repeat of MAE-East? IXPs need a real traffic cop, at the very least, to wreak havoc on people who play nasty link-layer games. (Yes, it's conceivable that everyone on the IXP could guard themselves, but this is highly inefficient both in dollars and hours spent.)
It would seem to me that you've two rather positive choices -> Elect the Routing Arbiter (Hi Bill :-) to police the XPs, or through capitalism force the XP operators to implement such a service.
The former would be difficult as the're A/ overworked, and B/ officially powerless at the XPs (unless the XPs annoint them, which is highly suspect). The latter would be difficult in light of a Robert Heinlein quote:
" If you give the people the ability to vote themselves bread and circuses, they will. "
(Heh. I remember that quote.) You've pretty much repeated my point...
Were the market to change (it might) we could have this. Or, one could create another market. Several smallerish XPs (StLouiX) comes to mind, have high quality peering standards built into them. I believe the CIX has done a fairly good job at this in the past.
But, it's my opinion that the only way to get MFS/PB/SL/AADS to listen is with the pocketbook.
Thus my decision. I think I'm going to tackle this one myself soon. I've given it a *lot* of thought. /a