Sorry for not replying sooner. I had indeed become imbued with the holiday spirit :).. I will respond to all mail in this one response:

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Folks,

Greetings. On the NCR discussion, I would just like to say that I appreciate everyone's input on this, including the non-US people. We are all internetworking cohorts affected by these issues and have an obligation to work out whatever solution is best for the network while giving commercial customers what they require. Everyone should

To whom do you refer when you say commercial customers (PSI or NCR)

Sorry to be unclear. I meant customers of the regionals such as NCR.

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feel free to work with each other on this since anything in the database can be changed. Yet again, I state the obvious while tip-toeing through the political tulips :-).

Well its looks like that there needs to be some kind of policy on how many routes one entity can have propogated, and of course the requisite appeal proccess :-). This problem will be recoccurring as larger places join to the net and are unwilling to change how they do things, wether or not it hurts the rest of the world. The more money becomes involved in netoworking the less likely it becomes that everybody will be willing to play nice and share :-)

I would agree that some kind of policy needs to be implemented if the equipment used to pass traffic cannot handle levels beyond certain thresholds. On the subject of technical solutions, if a viable one was presented to NCR, they could certainly implement that. In terms of administrative setup, it has been suggested that NCR be put on their own AS, so that regionals could ignore the NCR nets without ignoring all the PSINet traffic. Though no commercial organization has their own AS, I personally don't object to setting a precedent (again!) if it benefits the net. Perhaps others in nsfnet-admin and regional-techs, etc. could respond to this as well. You make a good point, though I would say that PSINet apparently did refuse NCR when first approached. The NIC granted NCR those nets. What does the NIC gain except continued roasting by people saying that they (the NIC, that is) don't know what they're doing? There is also the theory that PSINet gave the NIC some of their NCR $$$$ to get the NCR implementation which smells like musty Air Jordans to me (the theory, that is). Maybe we can get Joan Collins to play me in the made-for-tv version of this sordid little gem :-).. -B. Sue Blair Merit Network Operations