[arin-ppml] Hijackings

[Ronald F. Guilmette]

In message <F4BEC9A8-B189-46A4-A3FA-5AEEA1F1B479 at delong.com>, 
Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:

>On Apr 26, 2011, at 1:35 PM, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
>> In message <Pine.LNX.4.61.1104260938410.5148 at soloth.lewis.org>,
>> Jon Lewis <jlewis at lewis.org> wrote:
>>
>>> So, though most probably don't, I do have personal experience with ARIN
>>> acting as routing police.
>>
>> I personally would very much like to see _somebody_ take up the mantle
>> of "routing police".  Although ultra-democratic egalitarian chaos may
>> work just fine for PTA meetings and small-scale Libyan uprisings, I for
>> one have never been persuaded that it is a viable model for the management
>> of a planetary-scale network of networks that is responsible for handling
>> multiple trillions of dollars of commerce every year.
>>
>Viable or not, I am quite certain from experience that it is the worst 
>possible model except for all the others.

On this point Owen, you and I will have to agree to continue to disagree.

While I do not expect that to change anytime soon, I will just point out
that our forefathers had the good sense to design a system that included
_both_ an unruly leaderless egalitarian debating society (called "Congress")
_and_ also an Executive Branch.  I believe that they did that because they
realized that at the end of the day _somebody_ needs to have ultimate
authority.

But I digress.

>> But reality is what it is, and the reality is that 99.9% of the modern
>> Internet is owned and operated by corporations, and corporations are
>> always loath to allow anybody else to tell them what to do.
>>
>This is not necessarily a bad thing.

"Bad" is in the eye of the beholder.

I am quite sure that stockholders of multinational behemoths are quite
happy to know that virtually no single government anywhere can effectively
regulate them in any meaninful sense.

Conversely, I am equally sure that it was in fact a Bad Thing, even for
the shareholders, that apparently, the Japanese government was not able
to ever summon the will to tell Tokyo Electric what to do... at least
until it was already far too late... that the U.S. government was not able
to tell importers to keep the lead out of our toothpase and children's
toys before THAT occured, and that it was likewise unable to tell Citigroup,
BankOfAmerica, Lehman Brothers and a host of others to stop gambling with
other people's money AND with the future of this country.

I am a "small government" libertarian, but unfortunately it has been proven
that freedom and stupidity, especially the kind that can have far-reaching
effects upon _others_, are not, alas, mutually exclusive.

But again, I digress.

>> ... it seems like it might at least be a good idea
>> for the community to have _some_ defined mechanism of clearly expressing
>> its profound disapproval of the actions of those few participants that
>> deliberately and repeatedly flout even the scant and minimalist rules of
>> order which so far have managed to keep this unruly chaos afloat, even if
>> only barely.
>>
>I think the community has some mechanisms for that already. They are
>rare, poorly documented, and, not universal in acceptance or nature, but
>they do exist.

Agreed.

>The efficacy of them can be debated, but, for the most part,
>the internet does actually work, so, an argument can be made that what
>we have is not so bad.
>
>However, I agree that there is room for improvement...

We agree.

There do exist, apparently, some ad hoc and spottily enforced penalties
for those who flout the rules and route space that clearly doesn't belong
to them.  But to quote Samuel Johnson "The prospect of being hanged in
the morning focuses the mind wonderfully." and thus, I would argue,
formalizing both the crime and the penalty would prove advantageous.


Regards,
rfg