AOP Notification

[Alan Barrett]

Dave McClure <aop at cris.com> wrote:
> Cc: "'NAIPR at LISTS.INTERNIC.NET'" <NAIPR at LISTS.INTERNIC.NET>

Sigh.  More "'weirdly quoted'" junk in the headers.  And you still have
every paragraph as a single very long line.  Please fix your mailer to
conform to accepted norms.

> Scott, please allow me to respond to your e-mail to Steve May.  While
> Steve serves (and very well) on the AOP Board of Directors, I am
> responsible for communication to our members, and I authored the alert
> to our members.

I submit that you did your members a disservice by failing to explain
that naipr was a mailing list and that they should research the issues
and read the mailing list for some time before posting.  Many AOP
members who sent comments to the list had no idea that it was a mailing
list.  (I have this first hand, from correspondence with such people.)

That they did insufficient research before posting to the list is their
own fault, but that they did not know it was a mailing list is tracable 
directly to the AOP "Alert".

> We are faced with a situation in which a small number of
> self-appointed Internauts -- most of whom do not appear to be major
> ISPs, and who represent only an insignificant percentage of the people
> involved in public Internet Services -- are attempting to force
> a proposal which would hijack and hand absolute control of North
> American IP addresses to an unknown, intractable organization which
> will has no authority to begin with, will have no responsibility to
> the Internet industry and will not be monitored by anyone.

No, we are not faced with a situation like that at all.

>From where I sat in the ire/pagan bof at the San Jose IETF, it appeared
that there was consensus that starting a non-profit IP address registry
was a reasonable idea.  I haven't noticed any "major ISPs" that think
ARIN is a big conspiracy.  Even Karl Denninger appears to support the
concept (though perhaps not all the details).

As soon as the community thinks that ARIN is not doing the right thing
and is beyond hope of being fixed, the community will form the AntiNIC.
ARIN knows this, and so presumably will do the right thing.  Everybody
also knows that the AntiNIC will not be successful unless *it* has the
support of community consensus.

> This is a deeply flawed proposal that **must** have significant public
> discussion.  And it must have the consensus of the industry, not one
> relatively hidden listserv run by Network Solutions.

This is an imperfect proposal that *is* getting public discussion, and
that will have the consensus of the industry (or it will not succeed).

Helping to clarify the proposal and remove any bugs would be useful.
Your conspiracy theories are not useful.

> It's interesting to note that you, like many other critics of our
> alert, did not respond to the issues we raised but rather attacked the
> messenger.  Please take a moment to actually read what we wrote, which
> responded directly to the posted ARIN proposal.

I read it.  It had some good points, but was mostly scare mongering, and
demonstrated a lack of understanding both of the ARIN proposal and of
how IP address allocation works in the Internet.  Responding point by
point to such a thing would be a waste of time, but most of the points
have been addressed in this forum.

> We'll keep informing our members when such proposals arise.  That's
> our job.

I agree that informing your members about such proposals is a legitimate
and useful function of the AOP.  I wish you had done a better job of it.

--apb (Alan Barrett)