[arin-ppml] simple question about money

[Tom Vest]

On Jun 11, 2008, at 8:46 AM, bmanning at vacation.karoshi.com wrote:

>> 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?
>
> 	Tom,
> 	
> 	put on your academic hat and play the decentralization game...
> 	go grab the skitter graph::
> 	http://www.caida.org/research/topology/as_core_network/2007/
> 	and -remove- paths through the top 5 ASNs.
> 	Will your Internet experience be affected? If so, how and why?
> 	Can you replicate the mesh w/ massive peering on a local scale?
>
> 	One thing that I beleive you (and others) are conflating is
> 	access to address space and entries in some mythical "global
> 	routing table".  Just because some small player in Los Angeles
> 	gets a /28 for their needs (and have agreements w/ their peers
> 	to carry routes for that /28), is no reason Telia to be forced
> 	to carry that discreate /28.
>
> 	Your use of IP space does -NOT-  automatically equate to a
> 	slot in my routing table, either as a discreate entry or an
> 	aggregate.
>
>> TV
>
> --bill

Hi Bill,

You're point is well taken, esp. since it's roughly the same point I  
was trying to make about allocation policies being able to do *nothing  
more* than establish a norm of open access -- or open access to a  
critical resource which is necessary but not by itself sufficient to  
engage in independent Internet production. To repeat for the sake of  
clarity: "Necessary, but not sufficient" -- but "necessary" is still  
in there.

I don't know anyone who's making the mistake you're describing.

TV