[arin-ppml] Initial ISP Allocation Policy

[Owen DeLong]

Sent from my iPad

On Jul 18, 2013, at 1:13 AM, William Herrin <bill at herrin.us> wrote:

> 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?
> 

Comcast expects most of their customers to be attaching routers, not computers to the modem.

Starbucks does NOT expect you to be associating a router with their wifi.

I thought I was pretty clear about that above, but perhaps you have trouble understanding the distinction I am drawing between packet forwarding equipment and packet terminating hosts. I thought I was clear, I apologize if I was not.

>> I think getting into this level of semantic detail is a clear case of reductio ad absurdum.
> 
> I'll say it is!

You went there.

> 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.

That doesn't mean that one size fits all, either.

> 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

End-user.

> 2. assigned long-term to exclusive use by the organization's customers or users

LIR/ISP in most cases.

> 3. ephemerally assigned to exclusive use by the organization's
> customers or users

Could go either way, but most likely LIR/ISP if customers and End-user if users.

> 4. reserved for future use

Not sure what this means in this context, so very hard to make a meaningful reply.

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

Actually, I would say that most organizations fit into 1 or 2 pretty readily most of the time and we are seeing a growing, but still small number of corner cases that are more difficult to classify.

Nonetheless, treating all organizations the same would definitely be either grossly unfair to those in category 1, grossly unfair to those in category 2, or both IMHO.

Owen