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

[McTim]

On 10/4/07, Karl Auerbach <karl at cavebear.com> wrote:
> 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.

I see, when you said:

> On the other hand we have the demand for stable addresses and provider
> independent addresses:

I thought you were talking of two different types.
>
> > 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.
>

You can lead a horse to water..... In Uganda however, I have had some
small success in getting folk here more involved.  I'd like to see
more end-users involved in the process, In fact, I can see a possible
role for the IGF in encouraging this.

> The top level ICANN policy can be best expressed as "When a RIR asks,
> ICANN causes IANA to grant".

Not exactly, more like when an RIR asks, IANA gives (according to
these policies):
http://www.aso.icann.org/docs/aso-001-2.pdf
http://www.nro.net/policy/iana-rir-ipv6-allocation-proposal.html

>That's not a very satisfying policy

It is quite satisfying to the thousands of people who helped build it.

> that it is effectively an abrogation of responsibility and raises the
> question "Why is ICANN involved in IP address policy at all?"

Obviously because they have the MoU to manage the IANA activities.

>
> 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.

true, except for the AL and perhaps the NCUC.

>
> 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.
>

But they haven't failed, numbering policy is the ideal model for the
rest of IG, it's a spectacular success of bottom uppityness compared
to the DNS side.  They engaged the NRO and together, created the
current system described in the link I sent earlier.  If you want to
do away with ICANN involvement, and have the IANA deal directly with
the NRO, it won't make much functional difference to the status quo
AFAICS.

> 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.

but they already ARE flexible (polies change frequently in response to
the changing needs of the net) and The RIRs have 2 main goals, one of
them is aggregation.

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.

And that's exactly the history of the RIRs.

Jon
> and I agreed that the bailiwick of each RIR should be defined by
> technical connectivity not political correctness.

It's all about technical coordination and nowt to do with being PC.
The IGF is the body obsessed with political correctness!

http://www.ripe.net/ripe/index.html

RIPE (Réseaux IP Européens) is a collaborative forum open to all
parties interested in wide area IP networks in Europe and beyond. The
objective of RIPE is to ensure the administrative and technical
coordination necessary to enable the operation of a pan-European IP
network.

Google up the rest, and you'll get similar statements on the other RIR sites.

>
> And finally, the RIR's tend to operate as if those who participate are
> the only interests.

I've already explained that this is not the case.  Either you (and
others on this list) don't want to hear the truth of the matter, or
you don't believe me.

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.

but it can't create a body, it doesn't have the mandate, nor does a
another body need to be created. From a CS standpoint, the guidelines
in place are NOT going to get any better than what we have now in
terms of open, participatory, consensus driven policy making.

>
> 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.

Well, there is this: http://www.apnic.net/info/faq/ip_unnumb.html#2,
and there is RFC 1918 space, which you don't get from an RIR, neither
do you get Multicast space from an RIR.

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.

In the IPv6 world, those are all attainable, In the IPv4 world, as
exhaustion of the global pool gets closer, the RIR communities are
asking for greater efficiency, but costs are stable, not rising.

If you want to have all 3, (directly from IANA to end users), this
could easily be done with a web interface.  Of course NO aggregation
would be possible, and we would need a completely new routing
paradigm.

I don't think the IGF is up to that task.

-- 
Cheers,

McTim
$ whois -h whois.afrinic.net mctim
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