[ppml] Policy to help the little guys

[Peter Eisch]

On 3/20/08 4:24 PM, "Kevin Kargel" <kkargel at polartel.com> wrote:

>>>> 5. Each year, ARIN solicits bids for an ISP to serve as a
>> "catchall"
>>>> tunnel broker for the whole /16. The tunnel broker announces the
>>>> whole
>>>> /16 and (if you pay him) then tunnels any traffic to you via GRE in
>>> 
> So what we are talking about is really just an IP proxy service.  There
> are a number of "anonymizer" services out there that do pretty much
> exactly this for different reasons

To the contrary, I believe he's describing the exact opposite of an
anonymizer in function.  The problem with #5 is that the little guy now has
to pay two ISPs for hauling the traffic and still use a PA address to
terminate the tunnel.

Back to the topic though, I have to say that I'm aware of more than a
handful of organizations that desired ISP autonomy.  Along the path it's
fair to say that when their desires for independence were blocked by current
process of need justification, they manufactured the need for address space
in order to achieve their independence.

It's out there, it happens.  If they had the option to get a PI /28 they
never would have manufactured the need for a /23.  They got their routing
slot.  It just took them a little longer to get there.  Their intent wasn't
to squander address space.  It was a casualty on the road to achieve their
ISP autonomy.   

The longer you, the ARIN membership, choose to believe that these "little
guys" are too stupid to play the game of utilization, the longer it will
take to get back PI.  While you wait, the routing slots will continue to
increase regardless.

Back to a post I made last July (I think) regarding routing slot growth:
there's no shame in not being able to carry fully routes.  There's no shame
in being an aggregator.  Sure, it's harder to craft as-path filters so you
can best optimize your hardware's capacity.  It's not the end of the world
to add a default to a connected peer to handle routes that you can't afford
to keep.

peter