Comments on ARIN proposal

[Michael Dillon]

On Tue, 21 Jan 1997, Mark Richmond wrote:

> Are you aware of any Large ISP's or other philantropic organizations
> that might pay that fee so that a small or medium-sized ISP could make a
> bigger profit?  Me either.

The large ISP's pay those fees because they want two things. Simplicity
and control. By getting large enough aggregate blocks of IP addresses
which they can announce globally via BGP and which other providers will
listen to, they gain better control over their operations, their network
architecture and so on. It is important to note that no-one has to listen
to a BGP announcement that they do not want to listen to and most
providers do filter the BGP announcements they hear to ignore certain
types of announcement, mostly blocks that they consider too
small. Currently there is general agreement amongst providers that a /19
block is big enough that it will not be ignored.

The simplicity they gain is from having a somewhat unified address space
with only a small number of large aggregate blocks visible to the world
that are subdivided in such a way that they roughly match the provider's
internal network topology.

Now, you seem to think that the larger ISP's wouldn't pay the fees to help
the smaller ISP's make a larger profit. Yet the entire commercial Internet
industry grew up in 1994 because the large providers were willing to sell
access to smaller ISP's and allow them to resell services. There was a big
uproar back then about a plan that some CIX members were pushing that
would have seen the smaller ISP's virtually cut off from the Internet but
this plan was effectively scuttled by another large provider who did not
want to go along with it because they made a lot of money selling access
to smaller ISP's. The fundamental fact is that large providers make a lot
of money selling access services to small ISP's and it's fairly easy money
as well since providing a bunch of T1's requires a lot less support
services than providing dialup access directly.

Let's remember that there are a lot of forces at play here and it is a
gross oversimplification to paint the large providers as demonic forces
out to monopolize the net and squash the small ISP. This is simply not
the case.

Early last year I wrote a document that may be of use for those of you
preparing a FAQ. It is at htp://sidhe.memra.com/rough.txt but please don't
point any links at that site since it is the proxy server for my home LAN
and is only a dedicated dialup modem connection. But feel free to copy it
to your own server or to quote paragraphs in a FAQ.

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