| Now I don't claim to be a policy wonk and I don't have the | slightest idea of how to make this equitable and fair for all, but I do | know that this would result in an outcome that would give us routing tables | far smaller than our current 67k entries. It doesn't need to be equitable and fair to all; the fact is that I consider my routing table slots to be a scarce resource, and I will conserve that resource. Filtering is one approach; a step towards your approach is relaxing filters for people willing to pay me money to do so. I am sure that if someone with a too-long prefix went to a filtering provider and offered a (probably small) fee, a permanent hole in the inbound filters would be made. We arrive at your approach when we have the ability for someone with a too-long prefix to find every provider who is filtering out the prefix, and negotiate some sort of deal which ends up with a modification to their local filter list. This is a bit unwieldy, since in principle, every routing domain in the Internet might put up filters, and while it is true that perhaps not all of them are someone a person with a too-long prefix would want to talk to at any price greater than $0, a large set will be worth more. Several thousand negotiations (or even several hundred, or even several dozen, and possibly just several) likely will dissuade most people from trying to use a too-long prefix the first place. People with hardcore reasons for using a too-long prefix will probably be willing to pay a fee to an agent able to broker cheapest-possible access to the routing slots in the networks that are smart enough to sell them. As with any market negotiations, some users of a too-long prefix will get a better deal than others. Likewise, some networks can demand higher prices than others. Right now, there are only two known prices for access to routing slots by holders of any prefix of any length: $0 and $infinity. Unfortunately, people on NANOG are much more likely to jump up and down and scream and play politics and whine that THEIR long prefixes are so vitally important that nobody should charge them money for permitting them to occupy routing slots everywhere (because it is against the spirit of the Internet or something like that), than to negotiate an actual price less than $infinity simply by contacting the filtering provider(s) and making an initial offer (or asking them to do so). Your proposal likely will never fly while people in the industry remain hostilely unpragmatic and opposed to free market forces. However, should that change, there are fiddly little details which would have to be worked out; the ugliest of which would be a case where a provider which filters is willing to relax the filter-list in exchange for a small fee, but _it's_ provider is not (or demands a fee the originator is not willing to pay). Another take on this is to consider a global transit network and a national or regional transit network, each of which charges a small price for relaxing a filter against too-long prefixes. If the contract with the global transit network expires, and that GTN is the only direction the national network sees the too-long prefix, what then? A practical technical solution to this would allow "intermediate" backbones to enter into the game of selling routing slots in their networks, no matter what the "top tier" backbones do. | The correlation with route flap should be re-examined. I suspect that this | is no longer a driving force and is more than adequately compensated for by | having flap damping parameters that scale geometrically with the prefix | length. I agree that it should be re-examined, and I have the same suspicion. I believe the problem now is dealing with huge numbers of prefixes (thanks to the trend towards ever smaller networks multihoming) and their dynamism over a longer term than flap-dampening code considers. Sean.