[arin-ppml] Draft Policy ARIN-2013-6: Allocation of IPv4 and IPv6 Address Space to Out-of-region Requestors - Revised

[Owen DeLong]

Geoff Huston made some eloquent comments on this policy at
the NANOG PPC yesterday. I asked him to repeat those comments
on the list.

I received the following comment from Geoff Huston off-list.

I repost it here with his permission…

> I should note that as a member of APNIC staff I am
> neither for nor against this proposal, and my comment here is intended to
> be more of a comment that reflects on the role of address plans and the
> utility and value of the network. Nevertheless I'm sure that my own
> opinions will become evident here, but I would not like the ARIN AC folk to
> pay such opinions any attention in the context of their further
> consideration of the sense of the ARIN address policy community.
> 
> For some years I have advocated the benefits of managing addresses within
> the framework of the Regional Internet Registry administrative model in
> venues that were accustomed to immediately thinking that such matters were
> most appropritely matters for countries to manage individually and
> separately as sovereign entities. 
> 
> My response to this was to point out that right from the start, if there
> was one thing that was fundamental about the Internet that was different to
> many other technologies at the time was that it was borderless. In the 80's
> you applied to the Internic and completed your application for IP addresses
> and they responded with a confirmation that you had received an address
> block and it was uniquely assigned to you. And I could use these addresses
> anywhere I chose. That did not mean that doing business on the net was
> instantly enabled, or anything even close to that, but it was one less
> impediment in the path. The Regional Internet Registries did not spring up
> from a desire to build ring fences around geographies, but oddly enough
> quite the opposite. It was to make this process of obtaining addresses even
> easier and more convenient. You could speak to someone in your own time
> zone, who hopefully spoke your langiuage, but the end outcome, the address
> assignment, was precisely the same: a block of addresses that could be used
> anywhere on the Internet, and reachable by everyone else.
> 
> This breaking down of such impediments has happened in many ways and in
> many places, but the cumulative result has been the enabling of activities
> that have proved to be highly effective and engaging across the entire
> globe, and at the same time creating considerable economic value all over
> the world. Internet addresses that were not geo-politically scoped were not
> the only reaon for this, and perhaps this is not often listed in everyone's
> top 10 reasons why the Internet has managed to surpass everyone's
> expectations about its prospects, but it was is important factor
> nevertheless. If we had managed to fracture the address plant at any time
> in the past by putting arbitrary forms of ring fences around addresses,
> then I'd guess that we would not have got the Internet to where it is today.
> 
> So it seems to me that there are good reasons why you want to keep looking
> for ways to break down further impediments and barriers to use the
> Internet, and ways to make the network a tool for access to a seamless
> global environment. And, equally, there are probably many reasons to pause
> and reflect on the longer term implications of reverting to regional, or
> even national address plans. We many want to reflect on the network's
> routing architecture and the relationship of address frameworks and the
> costs and scaleability of global routing, or reflect on the value of ready
> access to a global population of clients for your services, and the ability
> to leverage the Internet to provide the most efficiently sourced services
> to customers without the overt impositions of localized barriers and
> impositions.
> 
> It's not that an open address model naturally enables all these beneficial
> outcomes, because it does not, but perhaps there is reason to think that
> the reverse, namely the imposition of a localised addressing model, does
> make a net contribution to the costs and overheads in using the Internet
> rather than to it's benefits.