[arin-ppml] RIPE/ITU

[David Farmer]

McTim wrote:
> HI David,
> 
> Yes, apologies, I had it in my calendar for the 2nd...it is indeed on Wednesday.
> 
> Terema kasih banyak.
> 

No problem, and thanks for the early reminder anyway.

So, I stayed up most of last night watching the session.

A few observations I took away from the session.

I think Sharil Tamizi made some good comments about seeing through 
different lenses, "There's a government lens, there's a private sector 
lens. There's a civil society lens, and there's a business lens. So, in 
our discussion here, I hope that you also keep those various 
perspectives in mind so that when you come to the question time, this is 
something that we can engage in a meaningful debate and discussion."

Xiaoya Yang made another comment, "I also want to mention that a fact 
that it's very difficult for government representative to participate in 
the Internet policy discussion. Because, as you could acknowledge if I'm 
representing our government, I cannot speak on my individual behalf."

This made me realize that what we in the Internet community consider as 
an open participatory process, may not actually be open to everyone.  As 
technical people our organizations generally allow us a great deal of 
latitude to express our individual opinions.  This is generally not the 
case for government bureaucrats, especially in the realm of 
international diplomacy.  I'm not sure what to do about this, but we 
probably shouldn't just ignore it.

I found the argument that a reservation of a large block of IPv6 
addresses is necessary for developing countries unconvincing.  There was 
no evidence presented that the current system has any danger of creating 
an IPv6 scarcity.  Whereas, if large blocks of IPv6 addresses begin to 
be reserved for various constituencies such a scarcity is more likely to 
be created.  If this constituency receives a reservation, other equally 
deserving constituencies will not be far behind.  Such administrative 
actions are far more likely to create a scarcity than any actual 
allocation activity.

It seems contradictory to me that CIRs would be created by the ITU in 
such a way that their policies would be subordinate to the current RIRs. 
  It was stated that the paper that discussing that CIRs could be 
created without adverse impact on the global routing table assumed that 
CIRs would have to follow the RIR's policies.  If this is really the 
case, then NIRs seem like a more appropriate way to serve the intended 
purpose of the CIRs.  If CIRs are intended to have policies independent 
of the RIRs then the conclusions of the paper must be called into question.

There were statements that competition to the RIRs or among the RIRs 
could reduce costs for ISP and the they could then invest more in IPv6 
deployment.  This may or may not be true, no evidence to support this 
was presented.  However, the typical annual fee for an IPv6 /32 
allocation to an ISP seems to be a small to minuscule fraction of the 
implementation or operational cost of an IPv6 network.  While fees are 
always an issue, it seems hard to believe that even the complete 
elimination of all IPv6 RIR fees could significantly impact the cost 
structure of implementing IPv6 for an ISP.

-- 
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David Farmer               Email:farmer at umn.edu
Networking & Telecommunication Services
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