> In the IETF, you need rough consensus to make decisions. I'm not > entirely sure how this works in all the RIRs, but I think at least > for ARIN, there is some form of voting involved. ARIN also has a consensus call/declaration. Voting (at meetings) is recorded for the record and for data. Mailing list input is also considered as part of the weighing of community input. The ARIN Advisory Committee (AC) makes the call as whether there is sufficient support for a proposal to go forward. Details of the overall process can be found at http://www.arin.net/policy/irpep.html > There are five RIRs, but the decisions they make often have global > impact, and once one RIR has taken a course of action, the others > often feel the need to follow. Correct. > Case in point is provider independent address space for IPv6. For a > decade, this wasn't possible because the IETF was first studying, and > after a _lot_ of effort to get things rolling, working on, mechanisms > to provide multihoming benefits without injecting a prefix into the > global routing table for each multihomed site. Then, with something > workable within reach but not quite finished, ARIN saw fit to allow > PI for IPv6 anyway, with potentially very harmful long-term results. This is one view of what happened. My take is not so simplistic. > The IETF leadership never saw fit to say something about this during > the ARIN process, and the ARIN process mostly consisted of "I'm not > worried about the future and I want my PI block". The RIR policy > mechanisms are simply not capable of rejecting policy changes that > benefit a subset of the community, especially any subset that is well- > versed in RIR matters, if such a change is against the interest of > the community at large. This is FUD, pure and simple. There was overwhelming support for the PI to end sites proposal. Anyone who was at the ARIN meeting would have to take away two things: 1) some people were seriously worried about the long-term impact the policy would have on routing table size, and 2) there was still an overwhelming sense that PI for end sites was needed anyway, to support the requirements of larger enterprises. There were even some people who shared _both_ views. > The IETF isn't immune to this, but does a lot better than the RIRs > because it has a technically capable leadership rather than an > administratively capable leadership. (Maybe that also explains the > differences in the financial situation between the RIRs and the > IETF...) I find your characterization of the ARIN AC as only "adminstratively capable" to be inaccurate and unhelpful. Thomas _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf