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

[Milton L Mueller]

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From: Avri Doria [mailto:avri at psg.com] 



it s also true that there is routing policy that is instantiated in these tables and some of it has to do with financial and political considerations - who will be allowed to transit a particular network is often a business and/or political decision.

 

Exactly. More fundamentally, there are a host of contractual, legal and financial incentives that govern how and why people route the way they do. Those arrangements are affected by public policy, sometimes directly sometimes indirectly. The fact that technical people are often unaware of these environmental factors doesn’t mean they don’t exist and are not important. 

 

but having said that, i certainly don't find myself in favor of some sort of top down policy control for these essentially local policy decisions.    and the idea of some regulatory entity having something to say about routing policy is somewhat frightening.

 

Anyone who knows my politics knows that I wouldn’t’ favor “top-down regulation” either. But we do have regulatory agencies that “have something to say about routing policy” – they are called Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). (I hope we don’t now have a useless conversation about whether RIRs are policy making entities or not.) The way RIRs allocate addresses has a lot to do with how routing takes place, doesn’t it? Block size, imposition of route aggregation constraints, and the need to register addresses with RIRs all have some kind of impact. The whole decision whether to create RIRs and what region qualifies for one would be a simple example of a decision that would have a major effect on routing policy. 

 

More generally, it is not inconceivable that there might be institutional decisions made at the national or global regarding liability, security, address transferability, police surveillance, contracting, consumer protection, etc. that could either facilitate the coordination of routes, or make the process worse.

 

I am eager to explore these issues. Unfortunately, it’s all too rare to find people like Karl Auerbach or Avri – technical people who are nevertheless willing to think about the economic and political aspects of the technical decision making. 


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