Today we often talk about SLA and redundancy. And the increasing role of clouds in the overall Internet infrastructure. Someone says that they will play a crucial role in traffic share in the nearest future. However, there are other huge ISPs - Tier-1, aka the biggest transit operators, which have transnational cables and indeed are part of the historical Internet backbone. They often play the role of last resort in the filtration process of bad routes. Because they have hundreds of customers. Also, almost all of these customers believe in what they got from the provider ISPs. That is the main reason why modern internet drafts rely on Tier-1s as flag carriers and hope that they’ll apply a new security mechanism among all the others.
Is this always a real scenario?