Registries differences

[John Curran]

At 14:17 4/28/97, Jim Fleming wrote:
>Once this industry matures, you might be able to
>pull them apart...there are pros and cons to doing that...

Hi Jim...  it's always nice to see a familiar name in 
the From fields of my inbound mail (of course, seeing
the same name can get tiresome after a while... ;-)

I'm not on edns-discuss, so I apologize in advance if
my message repeats discussion already covered there;
I've left both edns and naipr on this message as we're
talking about the differences between different resources
that might be served by various registries.

I agree that a registry is a registry; i.e. the basic 
function is to record the use of a resource and detect
any previous registration.  In many cases, there is an
implied uniqueness of registration that also needs to 
be served for the resource to remain useful.  All of 
the above is common between DNS and IP assignments.

However, the similarities are nominal compared to the 
differences in registration process due to additional
issues surrounding DNS and IP registrations and the 
need to develop policy and process which reflects very
different constituencies.  

For example, in the case of domain names, the process
used to perform registrations and the policies under 
which work is performed may have to consider some fun
intellectual property (e.g. trademark) concerns, _and_
these policies should be developed by a body which 
reflects the very diverse constituency.

In the case of IP allocation policies, there is a set
of requirements for routability and conservation which
need to be considered, and this means a policy body 
with a different constituency than the DNS case above.
I suppose it's possible to have one *big* group work
on both issues, but the IP routing folks and IP lawyers
(different IP :-) would end up in quite a few discussions 
without enough context.

I'd much rather keep the discussions (and solutions :-)
separate as we're far more likely to get outcomes which
are relevant; on the other hand, I can easily see how 
globbing everything together makes perfect sense if
you're only planning for a superficial treatment of
the actual issues involved in registering these very
different resources.

/John