[arin-ppml] RIPE/ITU

[William Herrin]

On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 4:35 AM,  <bmanning at vacation.karoshi.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 04, 2010 at 03:14:23AM -0500, John Curran wrote:
>> The RIR's are not engaged in "transnational regulatory and governance
>> powers": we perform "technical administration of numbering resources".
>
>        its not as if each of the RIRs individually or any
>        set of them collectivly is either soveriegn or the
>        result of a treaty negotiation ... there is no basis
>        on which one can claim "transnational regulatory and
>        goverence pwoers" for an RIR.

Bill,

As for basis, ARIN and the other RIRs hold contracts with IANA that
are essentially exclusive within geographic parameters except when we
accept a change. And IANA has been the authoritative source for
numbers used on the Internet since it was brought into being for that
purpose, well before there was a commercial Internet. Excepting
accidents every ISP accedes to that. And practically speaking, there's
nowhere else you can go for IP addresses that will be honored on the
Internet. And we apply strict, frequently arcane rules as to who can
have our IP addresses at all and how many they can have.


So I think Milton's description of an RIR as "a nonprofit, self-formed
group of technicians [with] transnational regulatory and governance
powers" is insightful, if incomplete.

Obviously there are important things about the RIRs that statement
doesn't capture. It doesn't capture the bottom-up nature of the
rulemaking process. I doesn't capture the degree to which its
public-initiated and public-advanced. But the description offers a
starting point from which a group of people used to classic
government-based regulation would be able to build a comprehensible
understanding of how ARIN fits into the Internet's big picture.

More to the point, it yields an immediately comprehensible reason why
an ITU competitive registry is a non-starter: because multiple
regulators in the same regulatory space doesn't work out well.

Regards,
Bill Herrin

-- 
William D. Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
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