Blah blah is right.....

[Michael Gersten]

Larry writes:

>Jim Fleming wrote:
>> 
>> If more companies had been allowed to develop
>> more Registry Industy Infrastructure during the
>> past 18 months, rather than debate how many
>> IAHCs or ARINs can dance on the head of a pin,
>> then we would all be much further, at least here in
>> the U.S.
>> 
>This is purely conjectural. It seems to me, rather, that no entity would
>have achieved the critical mass needed to become the authoritative
>reference which permits little folks like my Aunt Sue to cruise the net
>and look at the latest and greatest thing from "coke.com" or "uiuc.edu".
>You may, for your own reasons, wish to inhabit a world where standards
>do not exist, or where you, Jim Fleming, can personally establish them
>by fiat. (It seems to me that much of your argument can be lumped into
>the "sour grapes - why NIC/ARIN/whoever and not *ME* *ME* ME*"
>category), but aside from that, I fail to see two important things which
>you claim to be self-evident (and NEVER spell out in a concise reply,
>without burying your intent in "see this RFC" "look at this page") 
>
>a) exactly where do you see "billions" of annual dollars in the registry
>business coming from, (and why this should be seen as a good thing and
>not a useless transfer of wealth to a new class of middlemen) and 
>
>b) how will the many actual end-users of existing registry services be
>*persuaded* (that is, not *mandated* by you or anyone else) to use the
>plethora of sixty zillion new registries?
>
>Have you ever read the part about the Tower of Babel?
>
>/Larry
>
>also known to his slavish minions as .... "/0"

Ok Larry, lets spell out the number one value added service that
anyone in the registry business -- whether DNS or IP address --
has to provide: Lawsuit insurance.

There was a time when the Internet was small, and addresses could
be given out without worry, names also.

Then, the net grew.

Suddenly, the address system was not going to work. The internet
was litterally going to break under it's own weight (size of
routing tables, cost of memory, lack of CPU in some cases (Hi
Agis!) to search the routing table or merge in new updates from
neighbor sites). All the people involved -- NSI who was allocating
addresses, or co-ordinating the allocation when they were not actually
allocating, the major routers, and major unix vendors, aligned on
CIDR, even if they thought that there was better, because there
wasn't time to develope something better.

Now, people started to notice the NSI.

The net continued to grow. Trademarks and the DNS became hot.

People realized where this would go in a society as lawsuit happy
as ours. The original proposal (Postel) for DNS registries was about --
and stated so in the drafts -- providing sufficient funding to
create a legal entity that could withstand lawsuits.

Now, the address allocation scheme has come under attack for mucht
the same reason. People are not trusting the NSI, because they
feel that the NSI has shown that it completely failed to handle/
hand off the DNS issue in any reasonable manner. So, they now want
the NSI out of the IP business, while it can be done in an orderly
fashion, before it gets to be another "We don't have time to do something
good, just implement CIDR2".

That means coming up with something else. But instead of coming up
with something good, they came up with ARIN. ARIN looks like a
big, fat, deep pocket target for lawsuits. And, it wants to take
most or all of the unallocated addresses with it.

Why even give it to ARIN in the first place? As someone else said,
what if a lawsuit against the NSI wins, and the NSI goes bankrupt?

** ALL OF THE REGISTRY BUSINESS ULTIMATELY IS ABOUT LAWSUIT INSURANCE **

Anyone who is even thinking of going into this in any way must keep
this in mind.

Now, ARIN might be a really good idea. We'll never know from just
a proposal on paper. We'll only know if it tries and succedes.
Or if it tries and fails. That means it has to be started.

But it can start with just a /8, and someone else can come along
later with another idea. It doesn't need to have everything that
has not been given out to other IP allocators. And, if it only
gets a /8, then there's plenty of large blocks to give out to other
people who want to set things up.

Now, someone who knows the unallocated layout better than I do might
be able to say whether a /8 or a /10 (or even a /12) would be a better
choice.

Incidently, in the DNS field, eDNS is doing something similar. They
are establishing a system of registering registries for top level domains.
They are setting themselves up as a "zero pocket" target -- absolutely
no funds needed or taken. Last I checked, they had one client, Alternic,
which does take funds, and would be the lawsuit target. But eDNS is
a simple, neutral co-ordinator of all the TLD's from any registry.
(Yes, they support all the "standard" TLD's.)

		Michael