Greg Skinner wrote:
> If you
> feel strongly that some of the commercial providers who got legacy /8s
> ought to return some of those addresses, perhaps a constructive way of
> going about it is to gather the ISPs you feel are being squeezed, and
> have them file a formal complaint with the NTIA.
I think that the smaller ISPs are too intimidated by the power of
the upstream providers to make any sort of complaint. Only an
organization like ISPA could do that, and they won't because the
power there is with the larger independent ISPs who control their
own block.
> However, be prepared
> to hear from the NTIA that those allocations were designated for commercial
> use. (In the RFC, you can see those allocations are marked with a 'C'
> that specifies commercial use.) If it goes to the US Supreme Court, even
> they might choose to honor that distinction.
These smaller ISPs are mostly commercial. That's not the problem.
It's that the RIR-determined qualifications, both technical and
economic, for having blocks allocated directly from the source are
too high, forcing small operations to be beggars of the provider,
which is after all in competition with them and has every incentive
to keep them as small as possible (and often providing bad service,
as well).
These are problems caused by the RIRs, IANA, and now ICANN. They may
have some basis in the topology of routing, but they are
fundamentally problems of economic model, the present one being
favorable to concentration, merger, centralization, and monopoly,
rather than decentralization, independence, and free enterprise.
The Internet started out very free, but it has rapidly become
conservative. This is bad for end-users, it's bad for small
companies and small ISPs, and it's bad for the free enterprise
market-based system that the Internet has fostered until now and
that makes our economy flexible and adaptable. The infrastructure is
becoming frozen, and the courts are handing down decisions tending
to concentrate wealth. This just aint good for the Internet, not as
a dynamic system, IMO.
============================================================
Michael Sondow I.C.I.I.U. http://www.iciiu.org
Tel. (718)846-7482 Fax: (603)754-8927
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