Confusing Name Space with Address Space and Technical routing issues, and the LAND RUSH of '97.

[Larry Honig]

Howdy. Another semi-informed lurker here. Let me address two groups who
seem to be speaking at cross purposes on this list: the technical "ins",
who would certainly include people like Michael, Kim, Howard, Jon,
(don't let my omission be taken as any sort of "diss", folks, but since
I don't have years of clock time on this issue I obviously don't know
all of the players), and the technical newbies, who, while not idiots at
all (and who may be closer to the realities of grubbing for the cash
which keeps little operations alive than the gurus on the mountain),
don't seem to grok the essential differences between the registration of
names and the registration of numbers.

It seems to me that the continued confusion on this point - the need for
ARIN when there is already a perceived vehicle for registration of names
- is significant. Lets define a new term: the client/server ratio. At
present, most users (the AOL-mailbox crowd) have a very HIGH
client-server ratio; eg., most of their interaction is browsing or
passive reception of email, and very little originates that gets
propagated out onto the Web. Let's call the people with a high
client/server ratio "the public". Now, for symmetry, define the "trade"
as those entities (who may be individuals, companies or government
agencies, or whatever) with a LOW client/server ratio. Of course, there
may be gradations within these groups - the operators of IX points, or
the participants in peering agreements that swap terabytes of data per
hour clearly won't have the same interests, capital at risk (or
available), speed to maneuver, etc., as the mythical "Mom 'n Pop" ISP -
but both groups, to the public, appear as providers. 

Out of their aggregated self-interest, the public places a higher value
on certain features of the communications network than does the trade.
One example is the ease-of-finding a site, by using a name rather than a
static IP, or even a dynamic IP. Trademark owners know this phenomenon
well, and the reason that trademark owners spend money suing infringers
is that their trademarks are truly valuable. The trade, on the other
hand, is concerned about issues that the public never even hears about -
unreachable routes, efficiency of routing algorithms, backbone capacity,
etc. 


Some interesting questions can be asked. At what point - that is, how
much does the public's client/server ratio have to shift - will the
END-USER of communications services desire - or actually *need* -
published (you could use the routing term "advertised") names,  in name
space, in something close to real-time? How quickly will IPv6 - or other
extended addressing schemes - be practicable, and exactly how - and to
what - will the addresses be assigned (for example, to every
electron-passing piece of silicon, at the device level, at the appliance
level, at some evanescent applications level?) How will name space have
to adapt to the expansion of address space? How will pointer-to-pointer
services, like LDAP, facilitate this? How will the the regulatory
process (and ARIN smells to me like a regulatory entity in the making,
no matter how it gets dressed up) affect this assignment process? Will
it end up over-weighting the legitimate rights of capital, or will it
short-shrift them? To the public, I would submit, the proliferation of
regulatory bodies (even voluntary, associative bodies such as ARIN)
seems unnecessary, complex, and a flim-flam, even if, to the trade, the
regulated items (names versus IP's) seem obviously different, and hence
in need of differing regulatory procedures. 

The uninformed comments which confuse DNS registration issues with IP
registration issues could be taken as a plea to rationalize the process
IN THE EYES OF THE END-USER. This is a large-scale political issue, so
the public-relations element should not be dismissed. If this is <OFF
TOPIC>, then, of course, flame away.