[governance] For you as an Internet user what is a "Critical Internet resource"?

[Karl Auerbach]

McTim wrote:

>> On the other hand we have the demand for stable addresses and provider
>> independent addresses:
> 
> I've never heard the term "stable" used, I think your talking about PA
> allocations ( the numbering community calls them " PA") for "Provider
> Aggregatable".

I mean "stable" as in "our addresses won't change if we change 
providers", i.e. provider independent.

> While it is true that there are few global policies to coordinate, the
> ASO AC is alive and well.  It's the bottom upittyness of numbering
> policy...

That "bottom" is, as I pointed out, one that that today populated by 
those skilled in the arcane arts of routing and building routing gear. 
The consumers of those addresses tend to be underrepresented.

The top level ICANN policy can be best expressed as "When a RIR asks, 
ICANN causes IANA to grant".  That's not a very satisfying policy in 
that it is effectively an abrogation of responsibility and raises the 
question "Why is ICANN involved in IP address policy at all?"

By-the-way, in the land of ICANN it would certainly be nice if DNS 
policy bubbled up from those who register domain names, but such is not 
the case.

As for specific things that the IGF could undertake with regards to 
addressing: Recognize ICANN's failure to really engage on address 
policies and establish a new body to fill the vacancy.

Also, the IGF could recognize that RIRs ought to be flexible bodies that 
should exist in conformance with the aggregation possibilities of the 
actual connectivity of the net.  My last conversations with Jon Postel 
were on the subject of RIR's that grow, fade, merge, and split in accord 
with the growth and fading of lumps of rich internet connectivity.  Jon 
and I agreed that the bailiwick of each RIR should be defined by 
technical connectivity not political correctness.

And finally, the RIR's tend to operate as if those who participate are 
the only interests.  The IGF, of a body it creates, would be useful to 
establish guiding principles, or perhaps something softer, like 
guidelines, that express the address needs of the bulk of users who have 
trouble being articulate and persuasive in the relatively technical 
discussions inside the RIRs.

To be a bit more concrete - there have been a lot of notes on this list 
lately about some fairly abstract things, such as freedom of expression. 
  Well, that's a hard topic, but at the bottom of it, there is no way to 
be expressive on the net without some means to use a machine with an IP 
address.  Consequently a useful guideline or principle that the IGF 
could adopt is one that drives address policies to favor greater 
availability of addresses, at relatively low prices and gives less 
weight to the "efficient" use of address spaces.

		--karl--

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