ARIN proposal

[Michael Dillon]

On Wed, 22 Jan 1997, Tim Russell wrote:

>     Even though $2500 a year may not seem like a large sum of money to
> some people on this list, it's a good chunk of money to us.

Even if you get a /24 now at no charge it won't do you a darn bit of
good. If you are going to the BGP tutorial the day before the NANOG
meeting http://www.nanog.org then you will have an opportunity to meet
some of the people who will be filtering your /24 so as to make it
virtually useless. BTW it is highly recommended that any ISP who is
planning to multihome in the near future attend that tutorial on Feb 9th
in San Francisco the day before the 2-day NANOG meeting.

You see, ARIN or any other IP allocation agency does not run the net.
There are other important parties as well such as the providers who
operate the defaultless core of the net. These two groups don't always see
eye to eye about how things should be done. Even making ARIN into a member
controlled consortium is not likely to change this much because there will
be no obligation for any network operators to do things the way ARIN
thinks they should be done. Nor will there be an obligation for ARIN to do
things the way the network operators think things should be done.

ARIN is merely one piece in the puzzle.

> Nevertheless, it's
> not an amount that I'm willing to just blindly hand over to an organization
> that looks to me like it's wide open for Internic control and not especially
> accountable to its members.

In the USA where it is proposed that ARIN be incorporated, a non-profit
organization *IS* accountable to its members and no-one else presuming it
follows the law. Certainly there is little opportunity for the Internic
to control ARIN. In the first place, the Internic will likely disappear
from sight once the NSF cooperative agreement expires. And in the second
place, Network Solutions Inc. would only be eligible for one vote, the
same as any other member.

>  In fact, it looks like CIX all over again to me.

There is a big difference from the CIX fiasco. For one thing, people have
learned from the mistakes of others. For another thing, the scope of ARIN
is much more narrowly focussed than that of the CIX. And the CIX
themselves, along with ISP/C, AOP and several other industry associations,
will be watching what ARIN does.

>     Forgive me, but I simply don't see what it is in all this that makes
> $2500 an acceptable figure to charge for a block of addresses.

It would be nice if the RIPE and APNIC people on the list could post URL's
for pages that give a breakdown of where their monies are spent.

> that rely on "small" ISPs, and simply brushing the issue off by saying
> that we'll only be paying an extra $10 to our current provider doesn't
> cut it.  It offends me, in fact, because it isn't the issue.  The issue
> is the future of the net as a whole, and whether it will be enhanced
> or not by accepting the current proposal.

ARIN is only one piece in the puzzle. There are a lot of other venues
where decisions are made which affect the future of the net and those
venues are arguably more important than ARIN itself since the policies
that ARIN applies are largely created elsewhere. It will always be
difficult for small providers to have a voice in such things simply
because it takes a lot of study to understand who to talk to, when to
talk, and what kind of an approach will be most effective in
communicating real concerns in such a way that the listener takes those
concerns seriously. I've been working for the past year and a half trying
to get small to mid-size ISP's to band together in order to speak with one
unified and strong voice. Last summer this finally started to come to
fruition when several ISP's formed the ISP/C http://www.ispc.org but it is
still slow going to build such an organization to a critical mass.

I may seem like I'm some sort of ARIN booster. I'm not. Mostly what I
support here is the open process to create ARIN. If you hunt through the
archives of this list you will see that I was critical of some aspects
of the initial proposal. I will likely find things to criticize in the
revision as well. But I try to remember that everybody involved, both
myself and the drafters of the ARIN proposal are only human. We all make
mistakes, we all operate with an incomplete knowledge of the world, we are
all very busy because this network is growing so fast. Let's not waste
time flinging wild accusations around. Chances are those accusations are
wrong and based on incomplete knowledge.

It would be nice if the ARIN website were updated and a FAQ were posted
there but in the interim we have http://idt.net/~jeremiah

It would be nice if ftp://rs.internic.net/archives/NAIPR had an archive of
the mailing list but in the interim you can send

index NAIPR

to listserv at internic.net to get a list of documents (I would guess the
log to date is called LOG9701) and then send

get NAIPR LOG9701

to pick up a copy of the list archives. If my memory of how to get stuff
from a listserv is rusty, then forgive me and send

help

to listserv at internic.net to get some further instructions.


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