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

[David Conrad]

Guru,

On Oct 27, 2014, at 12:48 AM, Guru Acharya <gurcharya at gmail.com> wrote:
> Please take the reply in context of the fact that I do not support Proposal 98 - it is unarguably flawed; I am only trying to highlight the concerns that India may have taken into account.

Understood.

> I understand that current allocation is as per "need" (in contrast to equity between sub-regions). However, the allocation is also "first-come-first-serve" in addition to "need".
> ...

> IPv6 is a distant dream that will overcome the artificial scarcity and will understandably resolve the current situation. Im talking about IPv4.

The scarcity of IPv4 address is _not_ artificial. It is simply a fact.  As such the verb tense you used was wrong: the allocation _was_ "first-come-first-serve".

If I understand correctly, the implication of Proposal 98 is that the government of India wants to (a) strip IPv4 addresses from current registrants and/or (b) "redistribute" the remaining pool of IPv4 addresses, mostly held by AfriNIC (other RIRs have some address space left, but AfriNIC has, by far, the largest remaining pool) in a more "fair" (to whom?) fashion.

If viewed in the worst possible light, one could argue (a) is theft and (b) is reminiscent of past colonialist behavior with respect to resources on the continent of Africa. 

Neither of these seem either tenable or appropriate. As such, I have to wonder what exactly the point of Proposal 98 actually is.

> [Guru]: I agree that representatives on the APNIC EC do not represent their nations but an Indian will unarguably have a better understanding of the requirements/problems of domestic private players from India. Further, who will represent the people who are yet to connect to the internet (many such from India) if representation is limited to current resource holders?

There is a misunderstanding the role of APNIC's EC here. They do not make policy or represent anyone other than themselves. They ensure policy developed via the bottom-up community processes has followed the APNIC policy development process. 

> [Guru]: Agreed. I agree that "redistribution" sounds rather drastic. Please take it to mean any instrument that you deem fit for fixing the present institutional arrangement.

I'm not sure changing the terminology has much of an impact. Given the exhaustion of the IPv4 free pool, the 'instrument' is either some global version of "eminent domain" or markets, neither of which will address the fundamental underlying problem: 32 bits simply can not meet the global demand. Even in a world where one can renumber the entire Internet, you still have the problem that there are far more devices than can be address by 32 bits _now_, much less in the future.

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

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