US CODE: Title 15, Chapter 1, Section 2.

[Karl Auerbach]

> Blocks do need to be allocated by geography, either physical or at least
> topologically.  A central registry makes sense for that.  Now if you want
> to talk about how to reduce the cost of running such a registry, and
> therefore reduce the fees required to make such a registry work, that's
> great.  But to talk about a free-for-all is just inviting a chaotic
> collapse of the 'Net.
> 
> Is that what you want>?

I think I figured out why there is so much steam being generated.

My notion of "routability" doesn't mean that at the instant ARIN says
"here's a number" that one can go out, apply power, and magically expect
packets from the outside to find their way to the new block.  That's not
possible until the block has topological context.  I suspect that folks
were thinking that I was proposing some magical, impossible thing or that
the ARIN folks were going to have to configure the assignee's bgp or
something like that. 

My use of the term "routability" was ment in the prospective sense -- that
once a block was actually given topological significance -- i.e. that it's
exchange points with the rest of the world were determined -- then there
would be no artificial limits on the acceptance of that new block.  (By
artificial I mean things like "ISP X won't accept your advertisements
because your block is too small.")

In other words, membership in ARIN, or perhaps even the use of an address
by an ISP of a block carved from a larger ARIN allocated block might need
to carry with it an obligation on the part of that ISP to honor all other
ARIN derived allocations. 

By-the-way, I wasn't proposing a "free for all", only suggesting that the
possibility exists for the net to devolve into clouds of competing network
numbers.  And I did say that I considered that to be a dangerous future.

		--karl--