John Curran wrote (to someone not really worth bothering with): | Clarify... right now, many organizations with high-speed connections | to the Internet pay based on usage (including traffic sent). Doesn't | anyone on a usage-sensitive leased-line connection pay based on the | traffic regardless of the "legitimacy" of the hits received? Isn't | this why we all hunt down SMURFers? Moreover, the technology to mitigate the damage caused by an increase in demands on a traffic-generating service is straightforward. Several companies have inventive solutions for doing admissions control and traffic shaping, and several even more interesting efforts (notably some work on congestion- sensitive admissions control, which seeks to impose TCP-like congestion avoidance on fundamentally non-congestion-avoiding traffic) are being worked upon. As Scott Huddle noted a number of days ago, a source of traffic in theory *ALWAYS* has it in its power to control the volume and pattern of its transmissions. As right now, most such sources are in easy reach of practical ways of controlling the volume and pattern of its admissions for very low (or no) cost, a wise source of traffic in a sender-pays settlements-based world will already have been investigating ways of optimizing their traffic output. The one nit in John's followup is that in a sender-pays settlements-based world we do not have to hunt down SMURFers, or flooders -- providing they pay the larger bills based on the larger amount of traffic, the affected targets will have necessary revenue to adapt to such things, either through building bigger pipes or building systems to stop such traffic before one's egress interface (to avoid having to pay the next network along for all the flood traffic). Sean.