[arin-ppml] Initial ISP Allocation Policy

[William Herrin]

On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 8:54 PM, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
> On Jul 17, 2013, at 5:00 PM, William Herrin <bill at herrin.us> wrote:
>> On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 5:18 PM, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
>>> On Jul 17, 2013, at 4:34 PM, William Herrin <bill at herrin.us> wrote:
>>>> What about Comcast? They're in the business of providing cable
>>>> television service. They'll also provide you with Internet access on
>>>> the same coax cable with the modem they rent you.
>>>>
>>>> ISP or end-user?
>>>
>>> The service is intended to be used to connect customer-owned
>>> equipment to the internet. As such, they are clearly in the LIR/ISP realm.
>>
>> Starbucks, Hilton, they have large sections of the operation dedicated
>> to connecting customer-owned equipment to the Internet.
>
> Permit me to rephrase… The service (in the case of Comcast) is
> intended to connect customer-owned networking equipment to the
> internet (e.g. routers, bridges, etc.). In the case of Starbucks,
> Hilton, etc., the expectation is that you are connecting a terminal
> host and not a packet forwarding device.

Huh? Comcast is an ISP because they give you a modem to connect
between the coax and your ethernet port but Starbucks isn't because
you connect to a wifi access point instead?


> I think getting into this level of semantic detail is a clear case of reductio ad absurdum.

I'll say it is!


The point here is that 21st century networks don't look like the
dialup+webhost ISP of 1997, nor do they look like the "our employees
have Netscape and Eudora" end-user of 1997. Attempts to shoehorn 21st
century networks into those obsolete definitions frankly come up
looking pretty stupid.

What we *do* see is organizations managing IP addresses in several ways:

1. assigned to organization-owned infrastructure under the control of
the organization's employees
2. assigned long-term to exclusive use by the organization's customers or users
3. ephemerally assigned to exclusive use by the organization's
customers or users
4. reserved for future use

And we see that most organizations do a mix of all of these things,
not one or the other.

Regards,
Bill Herrin

-- 
William D. Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
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