Scaling ARIN proposal for small ISPs - and economic reality

[Howard C. Berkowitz]

At 12:01 AM -0500 1/22/97, David Hakala wrote:
>-- [ From: David Hakala * EMC.Ver #2.5.02 ] --
>
>> Your analysis has a few fundamental flaws.
>
>A "few?" Egad, I must have been inadvertently sober. :)
>
>> 1.  Most startup ISP's will never deal with the Internic directly.  They
>will
>> get their addresses from their upstream providers and only see the trickle
>down
>
>I keep hearing this, and I keep asking what sense it makes for me to buy my
>most vital resource from my competitors. Just because this is how it *has*
>been doesn't mean it should continue to be so. If ARIN charges fees based on
>individual IP addresses, it could become the truly neutral party in this
>scenario.

Please give us implementable engineering suggestions about how to avoid
buying such a resource from competitors in the next 6-18 months.

>
>> 2.  The price is not for the IP addresses, its for the act of registering
>the
>> addresses.  It will not be possible for someone to walk in and purchase IP
>> addresses without having technical justifications for needing them.
>
>I fail to see a pragmatic distinction, unless you're saying that I can be
>willing and able to license addresses (I've studiously avoided the term
>"buy") and ARIN could still refuse a license for reasons it need not have or
>reveal. That possibility REALLY scares me!

It's routine practice for providers of all sizes to reject addresses and
routes that cannot be verified, or are otherwise expected to be present on
a given physical link.  This is a basic operational protection against
configuration errors and hacking.  The addresses have to be registered
somewhere to be verifiable.