On Fri, 03 December 1999, Tony Li wrote:

I was not and am not suggesting that anyone stop all filtering. I am suggesting that a sane prefix settlement scheme would allow us to dispense with the filtering policies that are currently in place and would allow the backbone to globally distribute any prefix, regardless of prefix length, if only the originator has paid enough money and informed people first. You want to inject a /32? Go right ahead. Send your check to your provider and it can be made to happen.

Such a payment scheme has always existed. The provider with the most agressive filtering policy has always announced many prefixes which they wouldn't accept if the networks were customers of a different provider. Just make your checks out to all the providers you want to reach, and they'll each be happy to install a seperate circuit for your network. It worked for tymnet, telenet and compuserve. In today's Internet a difficult problem is figuring out if they are announcing a /32 accidently, for a dumb reason or for a good reason. Because my upstream provider is too dumb to aggregate isn't a good reason.