[ppml] Policy Proposal 2003-15: IPv4 Allocation Policy for the Africa Portion of the ARIN Region

[jlewis at lewis.org]

On Wed, 1 Oct 2003, William Stucke wrote:

> It's because they're MONOPOLY INCUMBENTS, and the mindset of this particular
> animal simply doesn't understand the concept of competition.

You skipped the more important second part of my question.

 Why are the monopoly incumbent carriers so reluctant to assign additional
 IPs when their customers have used up what they have?  

This part you answered...and it's not hard to guess that if they have a 
monopoly, they may just want to milk it for all they can.

 If it's simply to extort more money from them, is there any reason to
 believe giving them portable space is going to make a difference?  
 "oh...you want to do BGP now?...well, that's going to be an extra 
 $X/month per IP you announce to us."

So if the monopoly telco/Internet carrier is out to screw you and you 
have no other choices for Internet bandwidth (as implied by their 
monopoly status), how does all the portable IP space in the world help 
you?  Will the local government force them to do BGP and not extort you 
for doing so?

If the case is simply that they're being unreasonable with IP assignment /
reallocation, then I like the idea someone else suggested of there being
some mechanism for filing complaints with their upstream IR (whether thats
ARIN, or some ARIN member (or other RIRs...but this isn't the list for
other RIRs)) and for there to be some mechanism for the upstream IR to
lean on them and "make them be reasonable".  That should give people lots
to debate for quite a while. :)

How ridiculous would it be if a bunch of non-ARIN members started posting
to the list "Worldcon is the only provider in our rural locations and they
won't give us the IPs we need...we're being forced to run all our dial-up
ports and various other parts of our networks behind NAT because we just
don't have enough IP space.  How about you just make it so we qualify for
PI space?"
 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Jon Lewis *jlewis at lewis.org*|  I route
 Senior Network Engineer     |  therefore you are
 Atlantic Net                |  
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