[ppml] Fw: IRS goes IPv6!

[Joe Provo]

On Wed, Feb 22, 2006 at 09:37:48PM -0500, Scott Leibrand wrote:
> On 02/22/06 at 2:50pm -0800, Tony Hain <alh-ietf at tndh.net> wrote:
[snip]
> > The whole tier-mumble concept also has to be dropped. Too many egos are
> > wrapped around that particular axle, and that simply gets in the way of any
> > aggregation discussion.
> 
> I disagree.  While tier1 status is indeed a lot about ego, it is quite
> useful in a lot of technical discussions.  For example, the definition of
> a tier1 NSP is someone who peers (interconnects) with all other tier1's.
> (I'll leave settlement out of my definition, as it's not useful in
> technical discussions, just political and ego ones.)  If you'd prefer a
> less overloaded term, perhaps "transit-free NSP" would work.

Those terms both fail.

ISPs are business entities which receive registry allocations.  These 
business entities operate many ASNs with differing policies, 
unfortunately not always delineated by AS boundary. While an ARIN-sphere 
business entity may operate a transit-free network or portion of their 
network in the ARIN sphere, it may operate a transit-using network or 
portion of their network outside of said sphere... and vice-versa.
It seems to me that trying to tie an allocation policy to a routing
policy (which will change over time) is merely adding:
- admin overhead to the registry
- more stuff which the registry will have as rules and yet have no 
  method of enforcement (revocation anyone? great stability there)
- more admin overhead (cost) for the receiving ISPs that play along
 and 
- zero incentive for the receiving ISPs to actually play along.  
We've seen that work *so* well before.

In the Internet-wide scope, why is being transit-free --or more 
accurately, backup-free and disaster-vulnerable-- important? Those 
networks are *just* as reliant on third parties for carrying their 
traffic as transit-buying networks.  Multiples of those networks 
have had serious financial problems resulting in previous and current
acqusition by networks built along different policies that have 
been successful in business. I guess I'm wondering why we'd want to 
encourage f[l]ailing models.

The set of networks carrying a DFZ is larger.  The set of networks
ARIN represents is even larger.   Pushing to centralize forwarding
decisions affecting all of them in a manner counter to their economic
and stablisity concerns is poorly thought-out, not to mention casts 
a shadow of a bell-shaped head. 

Cheers,

Joe
 
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