[governance] What is RPKI and why should you care about it?

[Milton L Mueller]

These are good observations, Karl. 
It is good that you see the relevance of these issues. The IGF itself has had a hard time doing that. Note that our workshop is not listed as a feeder into the critical internet resources main session. This is not because routing-addressing are not vital to CIR, but because no one in the MAG was far sighted enough to view these issues as critical. As usual, they will wait until something blows up in their face and it's too late to do anything about it before they officially recognize routing as a major issue.

The term "system" does not necessarily imply the singularity you are asserting. A system is nothing more than a set of interrelated components; one can speak of the "economic system," the "price system" and so on without implying any centralization of authority.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Karl Auerbach [mailto:karl at cavebear.com]
> Sent: Saturday, September 11, 2010 8:28 PM
> To: governance at lists.cpsr.org
> Subject: Re: [governance] What is RPKI and why should you care about it?
> 
> On 09/11/2010 06:14 AM, Milton L Mueller wrote:
> 
> > That's the rationale behind our Workshop on "Routing and Resource
> > Certification." It's about the resource public key infrastructure
> (RPKI)
> > being proposed and implemented to secure the Internet's routing and
> > addressing system.
> 
> You are right in saying that those are significant matters - matters
> that could give, in the extreme case, the power to turn-off certain
> parts of the net (or rather, turn off information needed for packets
> flowing *to* certain parts of the net to find their way.)
> 
> You say the Internet's routing and addressing system" - I note the use
> of the singular form.  In practice there is not a single routing system
> - there are fairly standard protocols (most particularly BGP) but those
> are carrier-to-carrier rather than a unified mesh.  And there is an
> overlay of unilateral, bi-lateral, and multi-lateral agreements (human
> agreements turned into router configuration settings) that overlay the
> information that is moved by things like BGP.  And, of course, we are
> seeing a trend in which large content providers (like Google) have their
> own private networks that they hook directly to large edge network
> providers (such as Comcast) thus bypassing intermediate carriers.
> 
> Like fake-source email there is a problem with false or improper
> announcements of routing information.  (I'm dealing with that kind of
> problem myself - someone to whom I lent some address space some years
> ago is refusing to stop advertising his use of the space - that suggests
> that the issue goes deeper than "false identity" and can reach to
> whether the entity announcing routing information is empowered to do
> so.)
> 
> Regarding the other use of the singular form to "addressing" - with the
> increasing use of network address translation (there is even demand for
> it in IPv6) it is becoming increasingly hard to say which is the dog and
> which is the tail - is the "public" IP address space becoming merely a
> means to connect "private" address spaces?
> 
> I ask that latter question with an intent to suggest that we might see a
> future internet that is more "lumpy" than we see today.  The end-to-end
> principle may fade and be replaced by an internet in which rather than
> packets flowing unvexed end-to-end we see certain applications being
> bridged across boundaries that vanilla IP packets can not leap.  In
> other words the internet may evolve from being a seamless IP packet
> transport and become something more like the mobile telephone networks -
> certain basic features will work across providers but only because the
> providers build explicit (although often hidden from user view) bridges
> among themselves.
> 
> I have been slowly writing a note on how our perception of the internet
> is changing.  We who have been on the net for a long time tend to view
> it as a means of moving IP packets from one IP address to another.  Yet
> most people who have come to the net since, say 1995, tend to view the
> net not as a means of packet exchange but, rather, as a platform for
> certain applications.
> 
> That shift of perception, from packet-mesh to application-platform,
> radically changes our view of what is important to preserve on the net
> and also changes the points where pressure may be applied for purposes
> of imposing regulation/governance or creating anti-competitive regimes.
> 
> 	--karl--
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