"Competing" registries (was Re: A new American registry? - Welcome to discussions)

[Larry Vaden]

At 08:00 PM 7/15/97 -0400, Gordon Cook wrote:
>
>My take is that he could do what ever he wanted.
>But that 1.   IANA would not give him any new numbers.
>	
>	2. he could go to court and try to get a judge of order him to be
>given a class A.
>
>	3.how's he going to warranty the nmbers he assigns?  Do you think
>any of the major isps would be willing to route them?  I don't.
>
>	4. In such a case he could go back to court and try to get the DOJ
>to order them to be routed.
>
>	5.  a yes answer would be an agreement on the part of DOJ to
>regulate the internet.
>
>	6. the idea that any single country could successfully regulate
>the global internet is unlikely.

This thought process leaves out several possible "regular" solutions,
including the possibility that the IANA is willing or could be convinced to
conduct an experiment (check out the RIPE 62/8 experiment, e.g.) based on
the premise there is a market solution to the "routers will fall over"
problem.

>From an email posted to NANOG by Sean Doran:

>From: "Sean M. Doran" <smd at clock.org>
>To: michael at priori.net, nanog at merit.edu
>Subject: Re: Aggressive route flap dampening
>Date: 	Mon, 7 Jul 1997 13:44:28 -0700
>Sender: owner-nanog at merit.edu

<snip> ... </snip>

>I have explained a couple ideas for adjusting the "N" above 
>based on a cost + profit charging scheme.  Fundamentally, if you
>want to have less stringent antidampening applied to your prefix(es), 
>you pay money.  If you don't want to pay money then you do the
>normal things: keep very stable or aggregate into a stable block.
>
>The "N" should be reduced (or the time period lengthened) and the 
>cost of increasing that ratio should increase with the length of
>the prefix, in order to encourage topologically sound aggregation
>either through traditional means or through NAT and NAT-like boxes
>such as the one described and implemented by Paul Vixie.
>
>The point at which the price of increasing "N" becomes infinite
>would be up to the marketplace based on available and deployed
>technology.  Whether or not /24s or /25s or /26s could be seen
>in the important parts of the Internet was the topic of a series
>of long arguments during walks along some beaches in Southern
>California somoe time ago.  Some say categorically no, that is,
>you could never guarantee universal reachability for very long
>prefixes indefinitely.  On the other hand, a model which allows
>for flexible adjustment of dampening policy applied against specific
>chunks of address space is very attractive, and seems tractable.
>
>Micropayments accompanying NLRI, with payees being attached to
>prefix announcements much in the same way BGP community attributes
>are, is an attractive scheme for me.  It would then be up to various
>providers to adjust dampening policy based on these payment attributes 
>much as routing announcement policies are adjusted. (cf RFC 1997-1998)
>
>There are bookkeeping difficulties involved that should be familiar
>to most telephone companies who do international settlements, but
>which may be perceived as challenging to small fry used to 
>an environment with no settlements, and annoying to people who are
>unusued to debugging flappy networks.
>
>(One could also think of this as a small fee for the equivalent
>of typing "clear ip bgp damp prefix mask" at routers, which think
>should already be charged for.)
>
>There are other (mostly bilateral) flap-settlement/dampening-modification
>schemes which have been talked about here and there (piara comes to mind),
>but the micropayments scheme has the advantages that the footwork needs
>to be done by the announcers longer prefixes to determine whether they
>want or need to pay particular providers for having their routes remain
>visible (or be visible at all).
>
>In other words, this is an easy way of making it *possible* to announce
>even /32s nearly globally, although doing so obviously could be very
expensive
>and certainly would involve determining which of the potentially
>large numbers of networks would need to be paid to make the /32s
>in question reachable in their routing domains.
>
>[long prefix]
>| >announcements were responsible for the majority of the routing
>| >instability, and that simply blocking these announcements at
>| >an arbitrary prefix length would be the simplest way to 'fix'
>| >the problem. 
>
>It fixed two problems simultaneously: firstly, there is lots of flap
>and flap is most irritating when relatively unimportant (and statistically
>small is likely to be less important than large) NLRI is responsible for
>a disproportionally large amount of it.  Secondly, there are lots of
>networks which really ought to be aggregated.  When a single up/down or
>up/down/up flap makes the network unusable for an hour or two, people
>generally become motivated either to be very very stable or to aggregate
>even adjacent aggregatable /24s in order to suffer fewer disconnectivities.
>
>| >This may be true, but an alternate method of
>| >approach for this problem could solve all of this squabbling
>| >once and for all, at least in regard to this issue.
>
>Sure.  It's a race between the potential buckets of revenues
>in getting a flap/route settlement scheme in place in the face
>of people screaming who have long prefixes and unstable networks --
>in a sense _charging for the consumption of a currently scarce resource_ --
>and eliminating the scarcity by doing aggressive large scale
>involuntary NAT on one's peers (or customers or both), aggressive
>proxy aggregation, and the like.
>
>	Sean.