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

[McTim]

Been on holiday, hence the delay in my reply:

On 10/7/07, Milton L Mueller <mueller at syr.edu> wrote:
>
> 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.

To clear up another misconception, the folk who decide on routing
policy are FULLY aware of the "environmental factors".  These decisons
are not technical in nature, but mostly economic/financial.


>
>
>
>
>
> 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.)

RIR communities do make policy, but NOT routing policies.  RIRs are
all clear in that they do NOT guarantee routability of any address
space they allocate or assign.

The way RIRs allocate addresses has a
> lot to do with how routing takes place, doesn't it?

not really, let's take them one by one:

> Block size,

A /24 is routed the same way a /8 is routed, with BGP4 (usually), so
no difference there.

imposition
> of route aggregation constraints,

AFAIK, RIRs don't impose routing aggregation constraints, although
they DO keep aggregation in mind whenever possible when making
allocations.

> and the need to register addresses with
> RIRs all have some kind of impact.

In the RIRs I am familiar with, if it's an allocation or a PI
(End-User) assignment, the RIR does the registration in the RIR
Database.  LIRs do enter PA assignments in the appropriate RIR Db, and
these can be routed by an entity that is NOT the LIR, but this
requires an entry in a Routing Registry (not neccesarily the same as
an RIR).  In other words, it's difficult to route a PA assignment
block that is NOT registered in an RIR Db, but this is the task of an
LIR, NOT an RIR.

 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.

Why? With the birth of the two newest RIRs folk building filters just
have two more databases for their scripts to query.  I don't see any
"major effects".  Maybe you can ask the folk at Syracuse if they have
had to change their routing policies since LACNIC and AfriNIC came
into existence?

>
>
> 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 guess it's concievable, `i just can't see the IGF making these decisions.

>
> 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.

As above, routing is mostly an economic decision, the technical is
just the implementation.

-- 
Cheers,

McTim
$ whois -h whois.afrinic.net mctim
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