On Fri, 24 Mar 2000, Michael Sondow wrote:
> I think that the smaller ISPs are too intimidated by the power of
> the upstream providers to make any sort of complaint.
Michael, you're reaching. Smaller ISPs are more worried about running a
successful business than they are in protracted legal battles which they
generally don't have the funds for anyways.
> 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).
While I like to take the RIRs to task on several issues, there are very
real technical reasons to minimize the number of portable address blocks
available due to the deleterious effect a lack of ability to aggregate
addresses and summarize routes have on both the size and CPU/Memory
requirements necessary to hold and calculate routing tables. One would
have hoped that Moore's law would have kept up with routers as well, but
with a few notable exceptions times this does not seem to be the
case. High-end routers also tend to be very expensive meaning that if
steps were not taken to minimize portable allocations, providers would be
forced to purchase ever increasingly expensive routers at ever shortening
intervals. This cost of course would necessarily be shifted to the
consumer.
Each RIR has varying policies on allocations as well. RIPE for example,
while strongly discouraging organizations that don't truly need it, will
give anyone that asks who has a verifiable business presense in Europe a
/19 provided that they pay the applicable fees. ARIN has moved to actually
decrease the requirements for address allocation(organizations can apply
for /20's where they had to justify /19's previously.) ARIN has also made
other positive steps such as making audited financial statements available
on their website to everyone whether they are an ARIN member or not.
I'd like to see the organizations with "grandfathered" large allocations
be asked to justify those allocations or have them taken back. However, I
am cognizent that the true test of ownership of a thing is when one
attempts to take it away. All any of the RIRs can do is ask. If the
financial statements of ARIN are any indicator, any attempts at address
reclaimation "by force" would result in the RIR being sued out of
existence. If you had a fiscal obligation to a company is that a fight
you'd engage in?
I'd also like to see competition between providers of addresses for a
given geographic region, as I believe that the operations could be run at
a *much* lower cost and just as efficiently as they are currently.
Neither of these desires is worth spending a great deal of energy on
at the present time however. The largest problem is the current
ICANN abomination as a whole. In fact, the RIRs aren't too happy with
their new masters at ICANN either, as ICANN has taken to delegating itself
address space since ICANN representative apparently feel that the are
sufficiently above the RIRs that the rules do not apply to them.
> The Internet started out very free, but it has rapidly become
> conservative.
The Internet was never "very free." Someone was at all times paying for
it, it just generally wasn't the end users.
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Patrick Greenwell
Earth is a single point of failure.
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