Barney Wolff wrote: | Is it really the case that people with routers at exchange points actually | consider a packet addressed to one of their own customers to be theft of | service? So far, I note, we haven't heard any position expressed by | any of the big folks, just by others outraged on their | behalf. This, of course, now includes me. However I think have a different perspective than the other folks lumped in with me in the last sentence... Dumping traffic skews engineering projections for traffic loads, which can have dramatically nasty effects. A particular vendor's old-style FDDI interface has been built, as with other cards, with the assumption that traffic will be bidirectional. The buffer management policy really is geared towards send a frame, receive a frame, and anything else works poorly, particularly under heavy load. In one hypothetical case, consider a large provider that is being dumped upon by another provider which is outraged that the large provider consistently refuses to peer with them. This could have the result of pushing traffic inbound towards the larger provider over the threshold at which the difficulties in buffer management become highly noticeable, which leads to some 15% packet loss at times for customers of the larger provider trying to make use of that exchange point. I would consider this hypothetical situation to be a gross denial of service. Wouldn't you? Moreover, even in the case where hardware with ancient design criteria is not a key factor, having traffic arrive unexpectedly will tend to reduce the accuracy and value of other engineering predictions, and may lead to large increases in infrastructure costs. I would say that using a resource without permission that has a real monetary cost to the owner of that resource is a pretty canonical definition of "stealing". Sean.