The Gorgon's Knot. Was: Re: Verio Peering Question

Sat Sep 29 02:20:29 UTC 2001

| The only people who complained were Sprint customers.  They always
| had the same story, but the filter's don't apply to us. 

"_Sprint_'s filters don't apply to you.  These are _my_ filters."

Sprint has had stupid customers, just like everyone else.

"If you become a customer[*] of mine, then _my_ filters won't
apply to you either."

[*] here are our prices for transit, and we have a special deal
    where for just $XX.99 _my_ filters no longer apply to your networks

Oh wait, capitalism is evil and selling filter-exceptions is also
immoral (like Indulgences), so forget I mentioned it.  Let's go
back to whether or not I'm a lying corporate shill and an evil
greedy bastard, that's more fun than trying to figure out how to
approach non-technical problems presented by the marketplace.

| Upon further investigation, they always found they didn't
| need to announce those more specific routes.  With a little extra
| work, they figured out how to announce their registry allocated block.

Great, so the plan to distribute the education of the masses
off my desk and onto the desks of people like yours worked perfectly.

| If Sprint had used a consistent route announcement policy, their
| customers could have reduced their use of the global routing table
| must sooner.

It was consistent, just not symmetrical.

It was deliberate and an attempt to get others to filter likewise,
which would have accomplished exactly the same thing as symmetrical
filtering would have, only with protection from Sprint folks
deciding that filtering their customers might cause them to be unhappy
and go elsewhere, since there was no expectation that anybody else [*]
would filter their customers.

| "save the
| Internet, unless you pay Sprint extra then its all you can eat
| night at the village commons."

Shut up and send me a cheque.

	Sean.

[*] of consequence