[arin-ppml] Geoff's screed

[Milton L Mueller]

Wow. 

Geoff, this outburst is incredible. I am truly sorry that someone whose scientific work I greatly respect, and which is cited and praised in the paper, has produced such a sloppy, illogical reaction. My take is, frankly, that you haven't read the report at all. Nothing else can explain your fulminations below.

First, you confuse the TABL proposal with the CIR proposal. They are two separate reports, produced by separate teams, with different and often conflicting policy implications. 

Quite an astounding error, considering that I explained the difference in the email that prompted this exchange. So when you say,

> The ITU report proposes a market [sic] rationalist approach to address
> distributing [sic] by advocating blocks to countries and allowing 
> countries  to develop their own national address allocation frameworks? 
> You are really calling this a "market based approach" Milton?

No, I am not. That is what the CIR report proposed, not what I proposed. You are confusing two distinct reports and have probably not read either one. 

Second, if I am not mistaken, Geoff, you are and were one of the world's biggest supporters of ipv4 transfer markets, and are positioned as such in the upcoming Internet Governance Forum workshop, where you are teamed with <gasp> me in a debate with Tom Vest and Bill Woodcock.  It seems a bit schizophrenic for you to be issuing these blistering, condemnatory, and factless polemics alongside knee-jerk anti-market folks like Ted when the case for modest experimentation with Transferable AdBLs in v6 is not all that dissimilar to that of the arguments for transferability in v4. 

Third, you confuse this proposal with a 5-year old paper in which the idea of fostering competition in address allocation policies across different allocation authorities was proposed. That paper provoked one of the most amateurish attempts at economic analysis you have ever penned, Geoff: the joint paper with Wilson.  In that paper you argued that whenever competing entities allocate the same resource there will be an uncontrollable spiral to fast depletion - an argument that conflicts with known facts about our experience with hundreds of natural and man made resources and with everything we know about how competing firms handle resources on which their existence depends. The argument of your paper was refuted easily and thoroughly, as it would fail as an Economics 101 term paper. Whatever, the paper we are discussing now makes a completely different argument, and the fact that a report by me irritated you 5 years ago really has no relevance to the assessment of the TABL proposal. 

Let me go through a few more items here in an attempt to clean up the mess. But the overall tone of this is astounding. 

When is this community going to be able to sustain a rational discussion of the basic institutional economics of IP addressing in a way that incorporates two decades of institutionalism from Ostrom (who just won the Nobel prize) and about 6 decades of transaction cost economics? 

You can demonize me, and you can demonize "markets" in this isolated echoe chamber but neither you nor society as a whole can escape the need for complete and full discussion of the policy alternatives around IPv6 allocations. Better get used to rational discourse and put aside the hyperventilating and accusations that so and so is out to "destroy the Internet."