At 19:03 +0200 4/14/06, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
Both the IETF and the RIRs suffer from the problem that the people that
speak up are self-selected. Also, the fact that each RIR comes up with its
own policies but that the result shows up in routing tables world wide makes
no sense.
I disagree with that.
Each RIR is a membership-supported organization, with membership
largely based upon operational use of the Internet. By that I mean -
if you want to operate on the Internet, you need addressing numbers.
To get addressing numbers you can either buy up the assets of
something that has pre-RIR space or join an RIR. The latter entails
signing up to an agreement, getting space, and paying cost-recovery
dues (as opposed to "rent").
Don't confuse the RIR "public policy" meetings like the one held this
week in Montreal with what happens at an IETF. The *public* policy
meetings are held to gain access by the general populace to the
process; these meetings by themselves do not produce policy. Policy
within the RIRs are formally adopted only after internal review -
e.g., in the ARIN region, ratified by the Board who is (all but one)
elected by designated representatives of the membership.
If 60 people smoking a controlled substance voted for an unwise
policy I believe "checks and balances" would kick in before something
regretful happened. Bad policies may get through - but not because a
majority of people who happened to find the right hotel room.
Second point, the RIR polices try hard, but don't always succeed, in
staying away from the routing tables. Within ARIN, there is a
special sensitivity to that - the ISP participants try hard to make
sure that ARIN dictates nothing with respect to the routing table.
E.g., recently a policy went away from recommending /56 allocations
to a certain class of customers to saying that ARIN would measure
utilization (for the purposes of granting more space) base on /56
deployment. Any statement regarding how an ISP (LIR) is supposed to
run is being replaced by statements focusing only on what the RIRs
ought to do, and that is stewardship of the numbers.
I would encourage anyone that is concerned about there being five
separate RIR policy processes and yet only one global routing table
to take time to understand the dynamics of the situation before
drawing conclusions.
--
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Edward Lewis +1-571-434-5468
NeuStar
Nothin' more exciting than going to the printer to watch the toner drain...
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