US CODE: Title 15, Chapter 1, Section 2.

Karl Auerbach karl at CAVEBEAR.COM
Sun Feb 2 18:06:25 EST 1997


You brought up some very, very good points -- about transit and about dual
homing --

I guess what I'm getting at is this:

I think of ARIN not just as something that passes out address blocks -- I
consider that those who get the blocks ought to have some reciprocial
obligation to ARIN itself and to the other folks who got blocks. 

To my mind this obligation isn't so much a list of specific do's and
don'ts (although over time those might evolve), but rather as a general
mutual obligation to try to honor the grants.  By this, I mean that a
member is obligated to be reasonable (I know this is vague) about routing
information for ARIN grants.

I know that this is a very deep swamp with lots of hungry crocodiles.  If
Ford, for example, were to obtain an ARIN block, I wouldn't expect it to
willingly provide transit to General Motors (again assuming that it gets
an ARIN block.)  This gets heavily into the dark forest of policy routing.

What I'm fumbling with (and fumbling it is) is the example that you
brought up -- the medical group that justifies a dual-homed, provider
independent class C.  Yes, if there are enought of these it has the
potential to substantially remove the benefits of aggregation.

Yet, as we've seen with the AOL mess, people are starting to depend on
this stuff and as a consequence, I can see that the number of folks
wanting (and being able to justify) a direct, small block directly from
ARIN, could increase.

So, what I'm saying is that we could consider that everyone else who got
an ARIN block has an obligation to at least be reasonable in dealing with
these small ARIN blocks.  It's too early to say what "reasonable" is.  I
do feel that it certainly should not be an automatic barricade on blocks
less than some size.  (I.e. I think that "reasonable" involves some human
though processes.)

This is a big issue, and ARIN may not be the right place.  But ARIN is in
a position to say "if we grant you this block, you are subject to some
reciprocial obligations...".

		--karl--








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