One thing is for sure ... after catching up on this thread tonight; if the 'Net were to go away tomorrow, about 90% of us could find jobs writing the openinging monologue for Dennis Miller's next HBO show. -brian
Having waded through discussions of policy and definitions of transit, I thought I would try to make something more personally interesting out of this thread.
Let's say I have coloA, a colo company who wants to go out of it's way to not screw the big carrier B. In fact, I want to move all the packets destined for B on my network as far as I can and then dump it an the peering point closest to B's final destination. They will do hot potato to me, but I want to do the opposite with them.
Since we assume A and B are talking BGP, and B is doing it's job of not polluting the internet routing tables, there is most likely not going to be enough prefixes to make this work stock, MEDs or no. How does B send his POP level routing to A? (I make the assumption that the POP level is the closest correspondence to exchange connections.) Does this change if B is using BGP confederations or not? In this case, leaking is not a problem because A is a transit provider for no one and the filters eat all the routes, more specific or less.
Are there any downsides to B giving this information to A?
sorry, I'll try to keep the technical/operational issues to a minimum, jerry
-brian