ARIN Comments

[David R. Conrad]

[forwarded around my filters by someone who thinks it is worthwhile to
try and debunk Fleming, while I don't necessarily agree, I've switched
to decaffinated for a while and have regained my sense of humor, so I
thought I'd give it a try again]

>I am somewhat surprised that a person who makes part of their
>living allocating IP addresses for a "geographic" region would
>not understand the geo-political reasons why people like to
>work with organizations that are in the areas that: speak their
>language, understand their cultures, and are supportive of
>their communities.

This list is discussing the American Reigstry for Internet Numbers
(ARIN).  You are proposing creating a registry per US state.  Can you
explain the different languages and cultures these registries would
address?

As to being supportive of their communities, I'm glad you agree that
one of the goals of ARIN, namely providing the community it serves a
way of providing input to the operation of the registry, is a good
idea.

With respect to geographical constraints on registries, I have stated
publicly on the PAGAN list that I believe the registries should
compete and that geographical monopolies make no sense in today's
Internet.  However, that is just my personal opinion and does not
represent the view of APNIC (of course).

>In answer to your question about coordinating policies. The
>United States of America and its 50 states have had a long
>history of being able to coordinate policies. 

An arguable point (e.g., see the events called "the civil war" or the
"civil rights movement"), but irrelevant.  The fact that states can
coordinate policies implies nothing with respect to how a registry
delegated to states would coordinate among themselves.

However, taking your comment at face value, assuming each state in the
US was delegated a /8 as you propose, why should not each state in
Mexico, each province in Canada, and for that matter, each state/
province/prefecture in every country in the world not also be
delegated a /8 (other than the fact that you'd run out of /8s pretty
quickly)?  Why the astonishingly parochial viewpoint?

And why use states as the delinating boundary?  Why should (say)
Nevada have the same number of registries as (say) California?  Why
not use a more fair distribution function based on number of service
providers or population or number of telephones? 

But, suppose we follow your recommendation and treat Canada and Mexico
as US states (I'm sure this will go over very well) and we have 52
registries in North America (oops!  What about the Carribean
countries, don't they even get the same rights as US states?  Guess
not).  If these registries are competing, then presumably you would
charge for addresses, thereby moving away from the current policy of
allocating address based on demonstrated need to allocating based on
ability to pay, so Microsoft can get as much address space as they
want, and the small service providers you are so vocal in supporting
get what?  This approach has been suggested *many* times (including
the PIARA BOF in Montreal) and yet it has not been implemented.  Why
do you think that would be?

>If these views are not consistent with the views that you have
>seen as an attendee at meetings here in the U.S. with
>the people proposing ARIN, please expand on that for this
>ARIN discussion group.

Your views, particularly your proposal about delegating /8s to each US
state, are not consistant with the reality of anyone else on the
planet I'm aware of.  But keep trying (there is a story about an
infinite number of monkey typing on an infinite number of typewrites
that would likely be appropriate here, but I'll desist).

Regards,
-drc