size of the routing table is a big deal, especially in IPv6

Tue Nov 30 05:44:48 UTC 2004

At 12:00 AM 11/30/2004, Jeff Kell wrote:

>Tony Li wrote:
>
>>If there was a way that these costs were reallocated to the site that 
>>decided to be multihomed, then the economics of the situation would 
>>balance.  Imagine paying US $10K/yr to advertise a single prefix and you 
>>would get to a point where people would make some more rational decisions 
>>that didn't pollute the global table.
>
>Now there's a thought, and a pretty darned good one.  But, where would the 
>money go?  Upstream(s)?
>It would certainly encourage more forethought into advertisements and 
>aggregation.  But it leaves a lot of room for the economics to click.

If we're going to entertain a settlement-based approach, why stop there? We 
should add settlements to traffic, so the ISPs of end users pay content 
providers for the content, rather than the present system where content 
providers and end users all pay the folks in the middle (who still seem 
unable to make any money).

As Tony noted elsewhere in his note, the Internet doesn't have a central 
authority to impose the fees. It's a cooperative environment. We all 
advertise routes that we need, and hope others will take them. Just like we 
all filter traffic entering our networks at our borders so everyone else 
won't have to deal with spoofed traffic injected elsewhere (what? do 
something that helps the community as a whole?). Keeping the Internet 
functional is a community, cooperative effort. The fee Tony proposes likely 
will just result in only the larger companies being able to connect to the 
Internet, and would put a lot of smaller companies out of business. But 
that'd be best for the Internet, perhaps? 