Let's just go around in circles, shall we?

[Michael Dillon]

On Mon, 3 Feb 1997 Valdis.Kletnieks at VT.EDU wrote:

> Are you saying that you would *prohibit* these two companies from
> multihoming?  

There is more than one way to achieve the main goal that most compaies
have when they decide to multihome. Some of these solutions do not require
the company to have their own provider independent (PI) netblock. 
Therefore, nothing ARIN does can either enable or prohibit these companies
from receiving the benefits of multihoming. It's simply not an issue for
here on this list. 

IPv4 address blocks are an international public resource. It's not the job
of IANA, RIPE, APNIC or ARIN to make it easy to connect to the Internet or
to make it cheap to connect to the Internet. Their job is to prudently
allocate the public resource in such a way that the resource is not
depleted. If this forces some companies to do things the hard way rather
than the easy way, then this is OK because it serves the public interest.

> Are they
> therefor chained to what they can negotiate with *one* provider?

They are at liberty to negotiate with as many providers as they wish. ARIN
has nothing whatsoever to do with private business negotiations. If the
company is shrewd they will have structured their network so that
renumbering is cheap and painless and will thus be in a much stronger
negotiating position. It's a free country, but there ain't no such thing
as a free lunch.

Michael Dillon                   -               Internet & ISP Consulting
Memra Software Inc.              -                  Fax: +1-250-546-3049
http://www.memra.com             -               E-mail: michael at memra.com