[ppml] Afrinic and so-called sub-regional policies

[Leo Bicknell]

In a message written on Wed, Oct 08, 2003 at 10:46:26AM -0500, Bill Darte wrote:
> Little confusion about the meaning of RIR at this point.
> Correct me if I am wrong, but Mexico operated a (country-wide) NIR until
> being incorporated within LACNIC.  Every ISP is a LIR (localized) relative
> to a RIR (regionalized) and there are no independant (non-ISP) LIRs unless
> there are remaining NIRs of which I am unaware.  An even more localized ISP
> will be a LIR relative to a larger ISP, which again, is a LIR of a larger
> scope RIR....right?

I can't speak to mexico.  But my own thought on terms:

ISP has a definition that exists outside of IANA/ICANN/ARIN.  There
are many things that fit this global definition of ISP that do not
fit the definition of LIR.  For instance, a web hosting company may
be called an "ISP" in many circles, but may receive addresses only
from their upstream, never reassign addresses, and look more like an
"End User" from a address registry perspective.

Thus, I think using the term "ISP" (to define a class) in a policy
document is a bad idea.

Further, for the ISP's that do qualify as "LIR's", I think that
term is quite inappropriate.  There is nothing local about large
ISP's.  Indeed, several ISP's (my employer included) have allocations
from APNIC, RIPE, and ARIN because they reach a more global scope
than the RIR's.  Thus using "LIR" to refer to the qualifing ISP's
is a very misleading as well.

So, at the end of the day there are:

RIR's            - Regional Internet Registries
Allocation Users - Users who assign space to downstreams.
Assignment Users - Users who do not assign space to downstreams.

Those seem to be the only precise terms, with everything else being
poorly defined and/or not existing (anymore?).  As such perhaps those
are the only three terms we should use, for clarity?

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request at tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org
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