[ppml] Policy to help the little guys

[David Williamson]

On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 03:51:12PM +0900, Randy Bush wrote:
> David Williamson wrote:
> > If you can get a PA /24 for multi-homing, and anyone can, why can't
> > you get PI?
> 
> as a gedanken experiment, and maintaining my reputation as a notorious
> trouble-maker, why not longer than /24?  e.g. take a /16 and create a
> well-known micro-swam of say /29s for multi-homed content sites.

Sure, why not?  You could easily claim that market forces will take
care of it.  If my site has no useful interaction with somewhereistan,
I can simply block the short prefixes from them.  Or, at a higher
level, I could just block all of the /8s associated with a specific
RIR, based on my business model/needs.  On the flip side, I could
accept a bunch of /28s or /29s from sites important to me.

All it would take is some hard to maintain filters.  Oh, and the
assumption that all of the transit providers between me and those end
points provide transit down to the /29 level.  They'll do that if they
also see value in those routes, which might be in the form of income
provided by them or me.  I'm sure that most ISPs would gladly provide a
routing slot for a long prefix if they were appropriately compensated
for the trouble of doing so.  The price might be high, but I'm sure
that one could be found.

I think it unlikely that providing routes longer than
$current_std_longest_prefix will be very useful.  But it might.  I
actually almost proposed that - see the rationale for 2007-6.  For the
moment, I'd be happy with /24.

-David