this article is informative but misleading. i do the testing at a big ISP (your packets go over us for at least something). we test traceroute. we complain to vendors when traceroute doesn't work right. we do investigate weird traceroutes.

> It is, generally speaking, not possible to call AT&T and say "Hey, when I try to ping one of your subscribers in California from a Level3 circuit in New York, I'm hitting a routing loop."

I’ve reported similar things to my isp and they’ve changed their lock prefs to send the traffic via a different peer and bypass the problem.