Good intent and somewhat competent

[Michael Dillon]

On Sun, 19 Jan 1997, Nathan Soward wrote:

> What if one of the Big Guys or may be three MCI Sprint
> AT&T etc. decide to buy all of the address space what do you think an IP
> address will cost then?

This is why you can't simply buy an IP address; you have to justify your
need for them and show that you have wisely allocated the addresses you
already have. In addition, the total IPv4 address space is overseen by
IANA so even ARIN has to justify their need for IP addresses to allocate
and ARIN must share the total space with RIPE and APNIC as well.

No one is seriously proposing that IP addresses simply be treated as a
market commodity.

The crux of the whole ARIN issue is control. Who sould control IPv4
address allocations in North America. Today they are controlled by the
US government and paid for by the National Science Foundation, which is
funded out of the pocket of the US taxpayer. The fundamental ARIN proposal
is to move this function out of the government and place the control in
the hands of the Internet industry. In order for the industry to accept
this control they must also accept the need to fund the registry.

Since we already have experience in Europe and in the Asia Pacific region
with industry-controlled allocation of IP addresses, it seems natural to
attempt to structure ARIN based on that experience. If you want to see how
they do things elsewhere, http://www.ripe.net and http://www.apnic.net
would be natural starting points.

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