Pragmatism (was Re: [ppml] Re: 2005-1:Multi-national Business Enablement)

[Edward Lewis]

At 11:15 -0700 5/4/05, David Conrad wrote:

>Actually, I believe the ITU position (if it can be said to have a position)
>is that telecommunications (which includes the Internet) is a national
>sovereignty issue and nations have the right and responsibility to regulate
>and/or charge for whatever they feel appropriate to suit their national
>interests.  While people in "the West" may feel this is simply wrong, I
>suspect you'd get strenuous arguments from people in countries where
>telecommunication settlements account for significant portions of their
>country's GNP.

What follows is a question that reads like a statement - with the 
question being whether or not my attempt to rewrite the above is 
"hotter" or "colder" from the truth.

The ITU is a body formulated along national sovereignty lines to 
manage one critical resource of governance, namely 
telecommunications.  Aligning issues to national boundaries fits with 
the regulatory model of the world held by the body, as this fits with 
legal, judicial, financial, etc., alignments.

If the Internet has yet to scale one more order of magnitude (from 
about the estimated 1 billion users to the estimated population of 
the earth at 7 billion), the resources that are already regulated 
along national sovereignty boundaries will have to be tapped - and 
these will have to be tapped in accordance with "their" rules.  IOW, 
considering all of the resources used to build the Internet today - 
imagine needing to consume the same 9 times over.  Where do these 
resources come from?

>I believe even a perception profligate waste of address space such that it can
>be seen as even possible that we'll run out of address space greatly
>strengthens the hand of folks who believe the IPv6 address space should be
>chunked up and assigned to countries.  As such, I personally tend to be a bit
>conservative when reviewing IPv6 address allocation policies, specifically
>trying to avoid mistakes (such as fixed network mask lengths) that have been
>made in the past.

Especially because the ITU's managed address space has not run out. 
IPv4's is allegedly (prompting IPv6), so if we deplete v6 also the 
ITU can claim "we've never exhausted an address pool but they have - 
twice!"
-- 
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Edward Lewis                                                +1-571-434-5468
NeuStar

If you knew what I was thinking, you'd understand what I was saying.