Eric Hughes says:
I argue that if you hook your machine up to the Internet, you've implicitly authorized people to send you packets -- as many as they want and of whatever nature as they want. No service provision I've ever seen gives any recourse to the end user against the provider for "bad" packets.
Be that as it may, people HAVE been kicked off for mischief like forging routing packets -- and if someone started hosing me down with any one of several really nasty packet based attacks I'm familiar with I would expect action to be taken against them. Remember that degree is important in such instances. You are allowed to shine a flashlight at your neighbor's house -- you aren't allowed to shine a fifty megawatt laser. Degree counts.
I also think this is the one great flaw in the design of the Internet; namely, that the sender has all the control over what packets flow over the net. A receiver can ask for a slowdown or cessation, but there's no obligation to do so. This will be, if anything, the limiting factor in scalability of the internet.
I doubt it. It really hasn't proved to be an actual problem thus far. If anything, the limiting factor on scalability is the fact that the net has no locality of reference, which is making routing design harder and harder. Routing is currently THE big unsolved problem on the net -- something outsiders to the IETF rarely suspect, because the engineers have been faking it so well for so long. Unfortunately, all the good solutions to the routing problem are mathematically intractable -- and the practical ones are leading to bad potential long term problems... Perry