[CII] One possible scenario

[Joe St Sauver]

John commented:

#Think about a situation where all the "big boys" get knocked out.  I
#imagine it would look something like a situation where the small/mid
#sized service providers have lost all their transit relationships, but
#still have their peer relationships.
#
#Those that rely only on transit relationships would only have internal
#connectivity.  Those that had large degrees of route splay would have
#a correspondingly larger view of the Internet (or what was left of it).
#
#In such a situation, we could signal the imporatance of a given IP 
#address via BGP communities.  The amalgamation of large splay 
#providers could start trasiting this subset of routes, while still
#only peering for "normal" traffic.  This could be dealt with via
#a well-known community, and standardized among providers...
#
#Is this an option worth looking at within this community?  Can
#anyone point to similar work that we could build upon?

There's a perfect real world experiment that closely approximates
what you postulate, and that's the IPv6 world today. 

IPv6 routing has been plagued by well meaning attempts at improving
connectivity through the gratuitous provision of IPv6 transit. You 
know you've hit one of these scenarios when your IPv6 traffic from 
the West Coast to the East Coast of the United States takes a sudden 
detour via providers in Europe or Asia, for example.

I'd be really wary of counting on having people provide gratuitous 
IPv4 transit as an recovery solution based on how that's (not) 
worked in the IPv6 world. 

Just my two cents,

Regards,

Joe