[governance] what is it that threatens the Internet community or 'who is afraid of the IGF'

[McTim]

On 9/7/07, Milton L Mueller <mueller at syr.edu> wrote:
> MM
> And I have heard this argument many times before. Indeed, I heard it at the Oxford Internet Institute conference last year, where a room full of British, Americans and Europeans insisted that developing countries don't care about the CIR issues, they care about development and access. And when I pointed out that no one in the room was from a developing country, and that the parties who had raised the issue repeatedly in global forums were Brazil, South Africa, China and a other developing countries, that line of dialogue came to a rather abrupt end.
>

Well the Afri* folk I interact with daily certainly DO care about CIR issues,
as for most it is part of their business to do so.  However, these
same folk care MUCH
more about spreading the edge of the network.

>
<attempt at humour snipped>

>MM
> Anyway, in a period where we are about to run out of IPv4 addresses, we are starting a debate on markets for IP addresses and the old regime won't even consider it because it would upset their control.

Who is we?  The "old regime" has been discussing this for many years.
In fact, many feel this is inevitable.  Many/most recognise that there
are "gray" (and darker colored) markets in existence now.   There are
active discussions on multiple addressing related lists about this
very topic.  Please join if you want to have any policy making voice
on this issue.

MM
> And there are serious policy debates even within IETF about the bloc size of IPv6 address distributions.

Actually, no. The IETF stuck a fork in that one long ago.  I think it
was RFC3513 (or maybe 3531, I've always been dyslexic about those
two.)  Again all this info is widely available on IETF/RIR lists. I
encourage you to join them or read their archives if you really wwant
to gain "expertise" in these fields.

MM
>The idea that CIR is not relevant to ALL countries is just crazy. But
it is certainly relevant to >developing countries, who will be the
primary source of demand for address space in the >years to come.
>

I'm not sure I buy this, but I have heard it before.  2 things make me doubt it:

1) IPv4 address consumption is nearing it's "end game".  While growth
of the rate of new subscribers in the North may have declined, there
are still more folk with the cash to get online than in the South.
This demand will be primarily IPv4.

2) the "Internet of things" will require many millions/billions of
IPv6 addresses. I see this "Internet of things" happening first in the
developed world, as that is where the cash is to build it first.  (I
use "", as only things (network interfaces) use IP addresses already,
not people or countries.)

MM
> Likewise, most growth in domain name markets will come from multilingual new TLDs, which are most relevant to developing countries.
>

Agree, but, as you know, names aren't "critical" IMO.

MM
> Not to mention DNSSEC, another critical CIR issue.
>

This is losing "criticality" in my mind. We have know about the
threats that DNSSEC can prevent for over 15 years, if the threats were
so ominous we would have seen lots more attacks than we have seen.
DNSSEC deployment is going to go forward because so many people ave
invested so much of their time that it can't NOT be deployed. It
remains to be seen how widely it will be embraced, even if/when the
root is signed.

<load of bollocks snipped>

>about this but to repeat ITU-ICANN Punch and Judy show. Aside from
showing a terrible lack of imagination, this is irresponsible.

I think you are projecting.

> There are really meaty policy issues there.

Absolutely, and there is only ONE way to influence decisions on these
issues, and it's not the IGF.

>
> As physical access in developing countries grows, and as their own domestic ISP market increases in size, they will inherit a world where the rules for getting IP addresses and entering the domain name market have been written in the USA.

This is completely incorrect for (getting IP space).  Any "expert" in
the field should know better.

> More important than the geographic source of the rules is their substance: are they efficient, do they encourage competition, are they equitable? Perhaps at Rio we can move beyond Tunis if we actually have a real discussion of these issues.

Efficiency and promoting competition may be the criteria for names (I
don't really care about names, as they are simply a "layer of
misdirection"  For address space the criteria are more about
uniqueness, conservation and aggregation.

-- 
Cheers,

McTim
$ whois -h whois.afrinic.net mctim
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