
On Fri, 03 December 1999, Tony Li wrote:
> I was not and am not suggesting that anyone stop all filtering.  I am
> suggesting that a sane prefix settlement scheme would allow us to dispense
> with the filtering policies that are currently in place and would allow the
> backbone to globally distribute any prefix, regardless of prefix length, if
> only the originator has paid enough money and informed people first.  You
> want to inject a /32?  Go right ahead.  Send your check to your provider
> and it can be made to happen.

Such a payment scheme has always existed.  The provider with the most
agressive filtering policy has always announced many prefixes which they
wouldn't accept if the networks were customers of a different provider.
Just make your checks out to all the providers you want to reach, and
they'll each be happy to install a seperate circuit for your network.
It worked for tymnet, telenet and compuserve.

In today's Internet a difficult problem is figuring out if they are announcing
a /32 accidently, for a dumb reason or for a good reason.  Because my upstream
provider is too dumb to aggregate isn't a good reason.




