Blah blah is right.....

On Sat, 29 Mar 1997, Michael Gersten wrote:

> Why even give it to ARIN in the first place? As someone else said,
> what if a lawsuit against the NSI wins, and the NSI goes bankrupt?

Then the skilled people who are performing the IP allocation services as
employees of NSI find jobs at other DC area companies such as
UUnet/Worldcom, PSI, AOL, Digex, DataXchange and numerous others who are
faced with finding employees in a market where demand for skilled
employees is twice the current supply. And who knows what happens to the
records, the trash perhaps?

In fact, if things even get close to that point, those skilled employees
are not going to hang on for the ride.

I expect that the solution will be for IANA to choose either RIPE or APNIC
as the IP allocation authority for North America because they will be the
only people who know how to do the job.

> Now, ARIN might be a really good idea. We'll never know from just
> a proposal on paper. We'll only know if it tries and succedes.
> Or if it tries and fails. That means it has to be started.

Exactly. We can be pretty sure that if we take the same people, the same
systems and the same funding level as the Internic's IP allocation service
then we have a darn good chance of maintaining the same level of service.
And once that hurdle is past, then we are free to start changing the
policies and the activities of ARIN to better serve the people who use IP
addresses in North America.

> Now, someone who knows the unallocated layout better than I do might
> be able to say whether a /8 or a /10 (or even a /12) would be a better
> choice.

This is silly. If the Internic is going to stop doing IP allocations and
ARIN is going to start then they should just carry on with whatever
chunk of IP space that IANA has currently allocated to the Internic.

> Incidently, in the DNS field, eDNS is doing something similar. 

Irrelevant. IP allocations are totally unlike DNS.


Michael Dillon                   -               Internet & ISP Consulting
Memra Software Inc.              -                  Fax: +1-250-546-3049
http://www.memra.com             -               E-mail: michael at memra.com