[governance] IPv[4,6, 4/6] was IGF delhi format

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

> This is a correct statement if you believe that the current usage
> pattern across these countries/continents will be stable beyond the short
term
> and is even_desirable_or_acceptable.

You can certainly budget for overages .. and you can also budget for the
fact that a substantial part of Africa is quite probably served out of ARIN
or RIPE IP space because of satellite connectivity from providers in Canada,
Israel etc.

But what does desirability, or acceptability, or even, god help us, an
inclusive information society, pie in the sky and a chevy in every courtyard
have anything at all to do with these projections?

These are not subsistence levels McTim is talking about. He is referring to
the current and future projected availability of spare capacity and
resources.  Which AFRINIC does have, and to a certain extent so does APNIC,
as compared to ARIN and RIPE.

And these resources will last far longer if they are sensibly conserved and
managed, the way depletable fossil fuels like coal are conserved.  

Capacity building among ISPs in these regions to efficiently manage IP space
is one way to go .. a lot of them that I've seen simply use an excel sheet
or other manual methods to track IP space, and quite frequently lose track
of IPs they assign to customers .. forgetting to reclaim them and reallocate
them when a new customer comes in, so that huge amounts of IP space that
they believe allocated are actually lying unused.

There is a distressing trend among civil society - at least on this list -
to completely overlook the importance of capacity building and efficient
management of resources, in favor of these very standard arguments about
ownership and control.

Even though the model being criticized is fair, equitable and member driven.
AFRINIC, APNIC etc policies are set by their own members - the actual users
of the IP space, ISPs who provide services to their customers, and voted in
under a rough consensus model.

Now, I will probably be told that the real owners of these IPs are the
people - the dialup, cable, dsl, collocation etc customers - who actually
use them.  Not really applicable when these are utilities provided to the
public, like a phone number, or metered gas and electricity.  Plugging a
phone into a jack or a toaster into an electrical socket doesn't make you a
phone company or an electrical utility, just their customer. 

And the role of a customer in governance of these utilities that he uses, he
depends on, is known .. even respected - but there's no control there. Nor
should there be.

____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.cpsr.org
To be removed from the list, send any message to:
     governance-unsubscribe at lists.cpsr.org

For all list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance