Scaling ARIN proposal for small ISPs - and economic reality

[Michael Dillon]

On Tue, 21 Jan 1997, David Hakala wrote:

> The proffered alternative - getting addresses from one's larger competitors
> - is a prescription for anticompetitive behavior.

I find it hard to understand how anyone on this list could make such a
statement. In the Internet industry there is no alternative, *NONE*, to
dealing with your larger competitors. You must buy network access from
them or you simply cannot connect to the Internet, period. Given such a
reality it is hard to see how getting addresses from your larger
competitors, otherwise known as suppliers, can be seen in such a negative
light.

While the possibility does exist for anti-competitive behavior, the
address allocation procedures which ARIN will administer are not the
source of the problem. If the major network operators ceased to use
BGP and implemented some new magical routing technology that did not
require hierarchical address assignments, then ARIN would no longer
allocate addresses in the same way. Regardless of the technical details
behind the policies and procedures that are set for all IP allocation
authorities in the world, the fundamental fact remains that the IPv4
address space is limited in size and that we must ensure that it is used
frugally to maximize the useful lifetime of IPv4 on the global Internet.

Therefore some sort of allocation authority is necessary and the choices
become much clearer. Who will do the necessary work? Who will pay the
costs of doing the job properly? So far the popular answer to those
questions is: a consortium of the larger ISP's and other large users of
IPv4 address space. So far this model has been proven to work remarkably
well in practice and has not given rise to any anticompetitive behavior
that I am aware of.

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