Sean Doran <smd@clock.org> wrote:

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.

This is the reality. The Internet is no longer an academic/ research network, and the sooner people accept that money talks (and bullsh*t walks) in a commercial context, the sooner an equitable mechanism for guaranteeing reachability to specific networks will become established.

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.

I like this idea very much, because it makes a clear distinction between transit and reachability services. For instance, I might not want to use Sprint for transit, even though I want to have reachability to its customers. M.