RE $50 Million NSF windfall??

[Michael Dillon]

On Wed, 12 Mar 1997, Mark Richmond wrote:

> All this, of course, leads us back to ARIN.  If NSI wants to drop number
> assignments, but loses the contract next year, who decides?  Do we go
> through all this as an exercise, then scrap it when the new regime takes
> over?  If there is a new regime . . . 

Nope. Once ARIN takes over IP allocation responsibilities for North
America it is permanent unless and until the ARIN members want to change
it. The US government has only one slender shred of a connection to this
activity now and the creation of ARIN will cleanly snip that connection.

After that point, what happens in the National Science Foundation is not
terribly relevant to IP allocations.

This may seem to be an overly strong statement coming from somone who is
not on the BoT, not on the FNC, not affiliated in any way with NSF or any 
US government activity. But I make this statement based on one single
simple fact. IP allocations need to be done based on topology and topology
does not pay attention to national borders. Most especially, topology does
not pay attention to the US-Canada border. If IP allocations policies are
to be primarily based on technical criteria then they must be done in an
international venue. This means that the agencies of a single government
really have no place at the table other than as observers or as peer
participants on equal footing with all other ARIN members.

The moment any sort of US government oversight of ARIN is attempted, the
whole technical underpinning disappears. IP addresses are now primarily
allocated on the basis of national politics. The rules are negotiated in
another round of NAFTA negotiations. In the interim, people either start
using IPv6, renumber like mad with RFC1918 proxies, or use OSI and X.25
instead of IP.

But I think that some fairly senior people in the US government already
understand this so there is no real possibility of it happening. What you
see now in the media is caused by the fact that the low-level people
(politically speaking) like network operators understand why RFC2050
is the way it is and understand why ARIN, APNIC and RIPE NCC are the best
way we know how to handle IP allocations for the forseeable future. Some
of these people are highly respected at senior levels of the US government
for their technical abilities and the people at those senior levels know
from fairly direct communications that things like ARIN are the right way
to go. However, this stuff has completely bypassed the junior and senior
levels of the bureaucracy. Many people within the bureaucracy are only now
learning what the Internet is and struggling to understand it. It's not
surprising that they are coming to some ludicrously wrong conclusions.
But since the senior levels of government already understand the Internet
and where it fits into the big picture, these bureacrats have virtually
no influence that matters. 

So I don't think we need to seriously worry about the government stepping
in and taking over. If we do a good job at creating ARIN with a fair and
workable structure then ARIN will be allowed to do the job it was created
to do.

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