[arin-ppml] Why are ISPs allowed?

[Matthew Kaufman]

Kevin Kargel wrote:
> Wow that sounds easy.. all I have to do is roll a truck to 4000 customers,
> upgrade the firmware on their modems, install and test the software and
> integrate it in to their control panels.
>   
Right. And when the tech is on site, he loads up the customer database 
record that hasn't yet been upgraded to support having an IPv6 block 
assigned to each customer and sets the router to have the address that's 
in there.

Then the network management system that monitors the status of the 
customer connections that is no longer supported and never did IPv6 gets 
replaced for free with open source software that costs nothing to 
maintain, and you set that up using the same data that's not in the 
customer database. It of course ties right into the flow monitoring 
system that also doesn't support IPv6 which is how you track down DoS 
sources and heavy BitTorrent users.

There's a reason people aren't just rushing out to do this... it isn't 
free, and the benefits are vastly outweighed (at present) by the very 
real costs.

Matthew Kaufman