Search Engines/IP restrictions/policy changes

[Ted Pavlic]

> Most ISP's at this point use dynamically assigned IP addressing... each IP
> address (just like a modem port) being used by the maximum the ISP can get
> away with ( 10 customers per modem port is a workable standard)

There's no reason why ISPs have to use real IP addresses to allocate to
their users. A large cable provider could be providing addresses in the
10./8 network to their customers and do NAT. Changes like that are **MUCH**
less radical than the changes recently made by ARIN and would have far less
consequences.

ARIN is taking away IP addresses from those who need them most -- THE
INTERNET. They are taking them away from the Internet and giving them to the
people who are using the Internet. As a consequence, it's becoming much more
difficult for the Internet to provide services for those using it.

> As for the policy on IP addresses and Virtual Web hosting ... it did not
> come out of the blue.
> Most people I know saw it coming for about a year. It just went from
> "strongly advised against" to "against policy".

The Internet is NOT YET READY for that change, however. ARIN itself on:

http://www.arin.net/announcements/name_based_hosting.html

Cited Internet **DRAFTS** as reference material. Right on those drafts it
says in plain view:

   Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months
   and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any
   time.  It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference mate-
   rial or to cite them other than as ``work in progress.''

That it is inappropriate to do such a thing.

Secure communications is very big right now. SSL is an important thing and
is widely used by many hosts. The nature of SSL does not allow for
name-based SSL web hosting. TLS is hardly a solution to all of this. Using
HTTP/1.1 over TLS is hardly supported by any webservers and hardly supported
by any clients.

FrontPage Server Extensions are big right now. Some web providers depend on
them in order to give their clients access to their websites. Without some
major modifications to how FrontPage works, FPSE are COMPLETELY INCOMPATIBLE
with HTTP/1.1.

FTP virtual hosting cannot be done name-based.

Myself and other web hosting providers I have spoken to all feel that ARIN
just did not consider the needs of the providers which host most of the
sites on the Internet. One website companies are fine and small <256 host
webhosting providers are fine, but anyone who breaks that 256 mark has a LOT
of work to support name-based webhosting.

If this policy change causes a loss of business to ISPs who host thousands
of websites, those thousands of websites will be redistributed across the
Internet to smaller web hosting providers who still use IP-based webhosting.
Instead of one thousand sites going through one IP at a larger webhosting
provider, there will be one thousand sites going through one thousand IPs
all over the Internet.

That's what makes no sense about this policy change -- it just causes
problems and does not effectively SOLVE many (if ANY) problems. It just
allows for big ISPs to give more IPs to their residential customers WHO DO
NOT NEED THEM.

> I do agree that it would have been nice if ARIN had worked with the Search
> Engine folks (Yahoo/Google/Lycos/Hotbot/Etc) to be ready for this change
in
> policy.

Personally, I don't see what the big deal about the search engines is. The
search engines have an easy change to make -- they need to upgrade their web
spiders to use HTTP/1.1 instead of HTTP/1.0. That's easy -- maybe another
line of code to spit out a "Host:" line. I hardly think the search engine
issue is any big deal.

I don't think that ARIN should be held accountable for the search engines;
HOWEVER, I do think that ARIN should be held accountable for the tremendous
amount of trouble that name-based webhosting does to the rest of the world.
The Internet still **NEEDS** IP-based webhosting for all of the reasons I
mentioned above and I'm sure many more.

It really makes me wonder who's running the show...

All the best --
Ted