<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><blockquote type="cite"><div><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><br></font><blockquote type="cite">I would<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">compare this with a country's court system, a country's military, or<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">even with the United Nations - after all, they all serve a purpose as an<br></blockquote><blockquote type="cite">institutional monopoly, don't they?<br></blockquote></div></blockquote><br><blockquote type="cite"><div>Put another way, if you consider the RIRs to be exclusive governance authorities comparable to a country's legal/judiciary system, why the hell shouldn't governments have a controlling role?<br><br></div></blockquote></div><br><div>Because governments are limited to national boundaries and the internet is not.</div><div><br></div><div>Because governments, generally, do a poor job of including stakeholders in the</div><div>decision making process. Especially when compared to the all-inclusive bottom-</div><div>up community consensus based process used in the RIR system.</div><div><br></div><div>Because the RIR process, while inclusive, is necessarily slow in comparison to</div><div>the speed of innovation on the internet. For stability, that's a good thing. However,</div><div>the processes of international accords among multiple governments that would</div><div>be required for the governments to assume a controlling role would not be</div><div>merely slow, they would be glacial.</div><div><br></div><div>Because we have a working system in place with operational history and</div><div>governments have little or no experience with the vital details of the</div><div>policies in question and even less understanding of the implications of</div><div>various changes to those policies.</div><div><br></div><div>I'm sure there are probably more reasons, but, those are the ones that</div><div>come to mind off the top of my head.</div><div><br></div><div>Owen</div><div><br></div></body></html>