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

[Barry Shein]

On October 31, 2014 at 23:30 drc at virtualized.org (David Conrad) wrote:
 > 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.

The critical word was "authority", address allocation authority.

I was just referring to the fact that the RIRs are defined as
representing a set of nation states.

I'm not sure where the dispute in that is, they define themselves on
their web pages like this (earlier referenced.) With a few pragmatic
exceptions (e.g., territories.)

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

Of course. All governance ultimately derives from the consent of the
people etc.

 > 
 > 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.

They would have to get others to route it or else it would make little
difference to me.

At which point my complaint would be with those who agreed to route
the address beyond Elbonia.

But you can set up a NAT, for example, and use any address block on
the inside that you like. Many use 10.0.0.0/24, the old ARPAnet
block. No users are injured in the process.

They could use my blocks and I doubt I would notice unless something
was broken.

I did once have an ISP of some size maliciously route my block to
"punish" me (my company) for my detailing (naming and shaming) their
flagrant and profitable support of spamming activities in public,
providing resources to spammers.

Fortunately a much bigger ISP black-holed their entire operation in
response which resulted in a meeting of the minds.

I am happy to report that the offending ISP went bankrupt a couple of
years later.

As Tarzan would say, "it's a jungle out there!"

 > 
 > 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. 

Sure, we agree.

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

It already has.

 > 
 > > 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.

De facto and de jure have a way of converging after a while.

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

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