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

[Daniel Kalchev]

On 27.10.14 06:22, Guru Acharya wrote:
> I agree that India's strategy in Proposal 98 is not well thought out.

Not only that. It's political in nature and is impossible to implement
in the current reality. At least not in the way it is presented and not
with the goals/expectations that are behind it.

> However, I think India's concerns stem from the following:
> 
> 1) IP addresses are not equitably distributed in the Asia Pacific
> region. The skewed allocation is reflected in the statistics that
> Eastern Asia holds 2,712,098 of the IPv4/24 addresses while South Asia
> (including India) holds only 170,365 of the IPv4/24 addresses.

This is so everywhere. People call this legacy. It is just as it is and
best of all -- it works.

As already mentioned, those unhappy with the IPv4 address space
distribution can do just what is best for everyone (themselves
included): move along and adopt IPv6. As IPv6 is more widely adopted,
the significance of the IPv4 (if any) distribution will fade and will be
only of interest to historians.

> 
> 2) [...]
> Additionally, while this system of proportional voting creates a bias in
> favour of incumbent members who have grandfathered large IP holdings,
> the system penalises those members who are using IP addresses
> efficiently (for example by using Network Address Translation) and also
> penalises the community that is yet to connect to the Internet or has
> connected to the Internet late. 

There is another line of thinking here as well: the so called incumbents
with larger address space allocations are likely to serve much wider
audience (different users have different needs of IP addresses, NAT is
*not* the solution for everyone). By having more weight in how this all
is handled, obviously the "incumbents" have a system that favors stability.


> 
> 3) There are two options for redistribution of IP addresses. The first
> is to go through the APNIC PDP, which is to reform APNIC from within.
> The second is to bypass APNIC and ask ITU to take over the RIR function.
> India seems to have adopted the second path due to lack of trust in the
> first path, 

It is interesting to observe the hypocrisy here: The ITU is the typical
"incumbent" organization, with the sole focus on preserving it's members
investments (in an largely obsolete by now infrastructure).
What they are effectively trying to accomplish now is grab someone's
turf via their cooperating governments.

Nothing new under the Sun, but why should we, the public, support this?

> While I feel that India's concerns are genuine, I also feel the path
> adopted is incorrect. If this proposal goes through as is, it can
> fragment the Internet through three routes: First, through alternate
> (non-IETF) standards emerging (from ITU) to address security concerns
> that are not inter-operable with existing standards; Second, through a
> broken non-unique allocation of IP addresses where ITU and RIRs allocate
> IP addresses in parallel; Third, through an alternate root zone emerging
> to address the names part of Proposal 98.

There is not much threat in fragmenting the Internet. Everyone gets on
the Internet, because they so desire. Out of their own needs. Nobody is
mandating the use of Internet. All kinds of individuals, businesses, the
monopoly telcos themselves (who are the ITU's reason for existence),
governments -- everyone gets on the Internet and is more than happy that
it exists and (however unbelievably it sounds to some of them) it all
works. Like a miracle.

A much larger and more powerful nation state, China, has already
experimented with fragmenting the Internet. Not to mention the US (now
and in the past). They all find out that the price is way too high.

The normal people know ITU best for their standards making efforts.
There is nothing wrong with the ITU trying to develop globally
interoperable (and neutral) standards to complement the Internet
protocols. If those standards are useful, they will get wider acceptance
in the Internet. If not... will follow the fate of many other ITU
experiments. It is often not important what you do, but why.

By the way, if India ISPs wanted to have more IPv4 address space, they
should have worked to that effect earlier. IPv4 is essentially a done
deal now. There is no force to cause the Internet to renumber -- if
Internet participants are forced to do so, they will rather move to IPv6.

Daniel

-------------- next part --------------
____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.igcaucus.org
To be removed from the list, visit:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing

For all other list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.igcaucus.org/info/governance
To edit your profile and to find the IGC's charter, see:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/

Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t