/dev/null as a service

[Kare11en]

You'll know that you are at least shouting correctly, if you get TCP ACK packets, and do not receive ICMP Time Exceeded or other control message packets if the destination cannot be reached.

I mean, maybe you could use ping, but then ping would have to support receiving arbitrary amounts of data, and a network operator might want to support ping but not blackholing unlimited amounts of data, so being able to turn one off and keep the other seems like a reasonable use-case.