[arin-ppml] Policy Proposal: IPv4 Recovery Fund / history lesson #2

[Tom Vest]

On Nov 22, 2008, at 8:36 PM, Milton L Mueller wrote:

>> Needs based maintains a way to get
>> in the door. This is no different than a Lloyds of London checking
>> your bank account to make sure you have the minimum bid in cash
>> before letting you in.
>
> Even if you concede that ARIN can judge need objectively, (which I
> don't) once the free pool is gone it is not about need it is about
> relative need (he says for the 30th time, hoping it will actually sink
> in this time).

Milton, has it occurred to you that the vast majority of the people  
you're trying to influence are the same "beauty contest winners" that  
you frequently like to disparage? If ARIN's past allocation policies  
had no legitimate, objective, non-arbitrary basis, then why should its  
beneficiaries have any special say in how the resources are ultimately  
disposed of now? Why are you making your case to them at all? In fact,  
since you and others have pooh-poohed the technical risks of radical  
de-aggregation, why shouldn't the resources just be delegated directly  
to the customers to which they are currently assigned? If "big bang"  
style privatization* is coming to Internet resources, why not follow  
the established precedents and distribute them among all direct  
stakeholders?

Here's a more serious historical puzzle for you. Once NAT was invented  
-- about six months after CIDR was codified** -- why didn't existing  
Internet operators just run out the remaining public IPv4 addresses as  
quickly as possible? Sure, many thousands of new, equivalent "peer"  
institutions were created in the intervening years (including 90% or  
so of current ARIN members), but so what? After all, using NAT plus  
any arbitrary non-unique address space that can only be routed within  
a narrow, segregated routing domain would have provided all of the  
same opportunities then that a pure IPv6-based operator could enjoy  
today. Why do you suppose that that "opportunity" wasn't compelling  
back then, but it is today? What makes the CIDR solution, which turned  
a smaller prefix into a globally valid locator for a mix of public and  
private end-point identifiers, any less important and/or any less  
attainable today than it was a decade ago?

TV

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_therapy_(economics)

**RFC 1519 - Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR), September 1993.
  RFC 1631 - The IP Network Address Translator (NAT), May 1994.