| IP Transit If BellSouth does not want to provide Transit to IP Networks (source or destination) that do not pay them money (ie, purchase Transit), they are free to do so.
However, once they start limiting the Transit they provide, they will find that no one will transit their traffic either, and they will become an island unto themselves with no connectivity outside of their own little wee direct customer base.
Telco's and CableCo's are notoriously stupid and have absolutely zero idea how the Internet functions. If Bellsouth implements such a stupid policy, you can be assured that they will be out of the internet business in short order.
This is just as stupid as a certain other telco policy (Teleglobe Canada) of issuing BGP transit routes with overblown preferences so that all traffic was sucked into their crappy (slow) network so they could maintain their quid-quo-pro peerage arrangements. Unfortunately (for them, and fortunately for everyone else) this was noticed in rather short order, it became common practice to request that BGP announcements to Teleglobe be filtered. The result? Bankruptcy.
Problem solved.
Were Bellsouth to take such action I (for one) will arrange to have my networks filtered from Bellsouth transit altogether, and you can be assured that most carriers will do the same.
Since Bellsouth customers will only be able to talk to other Bellsouth customers, everyone will abandon Bellsouth. They will either "revisit" their policy, or go bankrupt.
In a free country, it is their choice. |
