If you consider some of this off topic I apologize. I've just come back
from a long weekend here in Canada to be greeted by 146 new postings in
this discussion list since I left work on Friday.
I must say I've been reading with great interest the heated debate on
New.net and whether or not their approach is ethical or not. "Buyer
beware" and other such cautions seems to be dated advice in a world
where there are lawyers poised everywhere to sue for damages where
clients are mislead (or feel they've been mislead). However the
philosophical debate is less cut and dried than the technical debate. I
doubt that if ICAAN desided to grant TLD's which are the same as the
suffixes offered by New.net that there'd be any "squatter's rights"
afforded for New.net registration holders.
Comparing the total number of people on the net to the ones that can see
the New.net subset is useful for people to know. However bringing the
total number of people in the world (which incidentally is far higher
than 4 billion) doesn't follow. I think that in our little
technological microcosms we forget that over 50% of the current world's
population will never use a phone before they die.
On the subject of Web Certs we have some customers using wildcard certs
on their co-hosted servers which I think make perfect sense for the
shopping cart style sites contained there. I think they look cleaner
than subdirectories and similar approaches. I only wish that there was
a big shakeup in the whole web cert industry to have them become a
little more responsive to customer demands like this.
I would like to single out Jim McAtee's statements about IP allocation
though. As an ISP I would wager that Jim's words are spoken like a man
who's never had to endure an ARIN audit or fill out the paperwork
required to get new IP blocks from ARIN. Keep in mind that IP's are not
free but ARIN won't give them to you even if you're willing to pay for
them! We have multiple Points Of Presence, servers (both ours and
clients), dial-up pools, dedicated clients, web certs, routers,
firewalls etc. etc. ARIN's response that if we'd configured our network
correctly we should be able to run everything on 5 IP's. That's not 5
Class C's or anything, that's 5 individual IP's!!! The problem doesn't
stop there. Our upstream providers (we've dealt with all the big ones
and they tell the same story) have told us that requesting new IP blocks
seems to spawn new audits from ARIN and then they get rejected anyways.
I'm talking about Sprint, UUNET, AT&T and others. On top of that to
maintain the highest level of performance many NSP's are refusing to
route anything less than a contiguous block of 7 Class C's which means
that if you have a few historical Class C's you own you may not want to
use them. In Canada the only NSP that seems to give out IP's like candy
is Bell Canada and there's lots of business reasons as to why you
wouldn't want to use them not the least of which is customer poaching
and anti-competitive practices. Our approach to client requests for
IP's is always to ask what they're using them for such that we can
ensure it's warranted. They're a very precious resource and certainly
being stingy with them has NOTHING to do with being "lazy" as Jim
claims. You do a ton of work only to be belittled and not given what
you really need to operate your business in the end. I wish the current
state of affairs wasn't like that but unfortunately it is and as such we
have to operate our business accordingly.
I appreciate that Tucows has setup the relationship for us to purchase
web certs in a streamlined fashion and done a responsive job of creating
a means of allowing us to get domains registered for our clients... now
if you could figure out a way of beating up ARIN on our behalf I'd be
eternally grateful!! :)
Cheers.
Jack Broughton
CanTech Solutions
