[arin-ppml] simple question about money

[Tom Vest]

On Jun 11, 2008, at 3:03 AM, Randy Bush wrote:

>> Not sure I understood you correctly. Did you mean that incumbents
>> perform routing table aggregation to create an entry barrier for  
>> small
>> sized prefixes or did you mean that incumbents have created a PI  
>> entry
>> barrier in response to routing table de-aggregation (or both)?
>
> incumbents have created a barrier to entry in the belief in a
> demonstrated fantasy that we can reduce routing table size.
>
> randy

Randy since the RIRs were established, tens of thousands of new  
operationally independent ISPS have been established.
Granted, lots have since been acquired and merged into yet larger ISPs  
-- some of which were/are pre-Internet incumbents, some of which are  
incumbents of our very own -- but that's not something that's affected  
by address policy one way or another (except maybe to delay what would  
have happened anyway as a result of market power, increasing returns  
to scale, etc.).

So, if you believe that address policy itself has been a barrier to  
entry, how many address resource recipients *should* there be? How  
many are missing? How much *more* decentralized should our industry be  
today relative to all of the others?

The level of address resource concentration across players in our  
particular industry is pretty substantial, until you start to compare  
it to other large industries (auto manufacturing, banking, etc.),  
relative to which we are fabulously decentralized. Again, granted,  
concentration levels are rising somewhat today, but unless  you want  
address policy to become an explicit benchmark and powerful tool of  
(otherwise generally toothless) national antitrust policies, it's not  
clear what more any address policy body could do to offset this trend.

Finally, if "incumbents" are the guilty party in your interpretation  
of recent history, how is privatizing address resources and giving  
incumbents the power to directly/unilaterally set (minimum/ 
unavoidable) prices for future operator entry and growth going to make  
matters better? They are also going to be the same institutions whose  
commercial strategies will determine when (if ever) v6-to-v4 gateway  
services will no longer be mandatory, so simply pointing to IPv6 as an  
alternative does not answer the question.

If we really are missing lots of lots of independent operators that  
would otherwise be in (independent) operation today purely because of  
address policy "capture" by incumbents, and we're facing an indefinite  
future of 6/4 translation -- and routing table size is really immune  
to address allocation policies as you seem to suggest (or perhaps  
recommend) -- then maybe all of the remaining /32s should be  
distributed to individuals, like driver's licenses -- or rather like  
the privatization vouchers that were the basis for redistribution of  
common pool assets on Poland, Russia, etc...?

Doesn't seem like that always leads to radical, enduring  
decentralization either :-\

TV