[governance] PP: India wants to abolish BGP and introduce national routing and IP management

[David Conrad]

Barry,

On Oct 31, 2014, at 9:02 PM, Barry Shein <bzs at world.std.com> wrote:
> So to go back to the original point (not by you, what I was responding
> to): Stating that IP address allocation authority should not be
> "Westphalian" seems, I'll use the word again, disingenuous.

In no way can IP address allocation be considered Westphalian, at least as I understand the term.

In my view, IP address allocation authority derives from the acceptance of the network operational community to accept the authority of the registry system.

If you disagree, what do you think would happen if (say) the government of West Elbonia decided to "redistribute" 192.74.137.0/24 to themselves.  My experience has been that ISPs care a bit more about contracts and getting paid than what some far off nation in which they have no customers might decide on any given day.

Nation-states have the ability to compel entities within their borders to do things they might not otherwise desire to do. In the context of IP address allocation, a nation-state can compel ISPs within that nation-state's borders to ignore the allocations of the registry system, however the impact of that action would mostly be to disconnect the nation-state from the Internet unless ISPs outside of the nation-state agree.  This would be ... unlikely as it is a sure path to pure chaos. By and large, nation-states prefer not to kill the goose that laid the golden egg, so they haven't (to date) ignored the existing registry system, despite its numerous warts. 

Life might get a little more interesting with IPv4 exhaustion, but I hope not.

> Perhaps stating a contrapositive is even more clear: Other than
> perhaps some small outlying islands or similar special cases no
> nation-state is split between two RIRs. Even the vast Russian
> Federation which spans two continents is entirely within only the RIPE
> NCC region.

I believe the fact that the IEPG/FNC/IAB/RIRs decided to split up the planet on semi-arbitrary geopolitical boundaries was purely a convenience. It was not related to allocation authority.

Regards,
-drc
(ICANN CTO, but speaking only for myself. Really.)

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