[arin-ppml] 2008-3 Community WIreless Networks

[Martin Hannigan]

On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 9:55 AM, George, Wes E
[NTK]<Wesley.E.George at sprint.com> wrote:
> Owen, thanks for the clarifications.
>

[ snip ]

> I agree with Martin that we should probably abandon this proposal and try again.
> Please don't misinterpret this as me being against any proposal of this type, as I can see genuine value in having address space available for the hobbyists/experimenters/innovators out there. As I said in my previous mail, I think that we'd be better off with a proposal that allows for direct PI allocations for experimental networks, and then make the requirements such that some subset of community networks, especially the ones that don't necessarily count "ISP" among their primary objectives, would qualify to get space that way.

Perhaps elaborating on the NGO idea may be helpful. NGO's are usually
non-profit organizations that are dedicated to "doing good" for people
that "need to have some good done" for them. We could use the intent
of this policy and instead of direct allocations to end users we can
allocate to NGO's to support funded projects to "bring the net" to the
masses. This solves a few problems. I would expect that funded
organizations would be able to meet ARIN standards as far as the RSA
goes and be point for law enforcement inquiries; we wouldn't have
allocation islands hanging in the wind with no apparent responsibility
party. The NGO would be the party entering into the agreement with
ARIN and hopefully their plan to allocate to 200 networks would be
written to state that anyone applying for the allocations would be
allocated regardless of being islands or stubs. Defining NGO is a
challenge because we are likely to have every non profit on the planet
claim that they are an NGO -- which may not be such a bad thing.

This may allow more experienced entities to determine non-technical
delegation need (social need since this seems to be the intent of the
policy) and do the work more effectively than "we " can. At least in
theory. People who have need get space, we get our agreement signed by
responsible parties, our fees are paid, people that want whois
contacts get their contacts, and people who want to do good get to do
good.

> It's semantics, but I think it addresses an important concern that keeps coming up in this debate - not being so stingy with the very large address space that is IPv6 that we stifle innovation, while not being wasteful or opening up a loophole to provide everyone with a router and a non-profit business plan a /48 to announce to the global Internet.
> Perhaps an update to NRPM section 11 with a slightly broader definition of experimental? Specifically, I'm thinking about allowing for open-ended experimental plans, with some provision to revisit the progress and justification for the experiment periodically to see if the allocation is still justified.

I think we should consider the NGO approach before we widen the
definition of experimental to be honest. I fear that we would see far
more exploitation of the latter.

Best Regards,

Marty