Comments on ARIN proposal

[Paul Ferguson]

Michael,

I commend you -- you have the patience of a Saint.

- paul


At 11:12 PM 1/21/97 -0800, Michael Dillon wrote:

>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
>