North American Network Operators Group

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InterNIC RS

  • From: Hans-Werner Braun
  • Date: Sun Mar 19 14:19:33 1995

Okay, it seems to me that people here perceive there is reasonable
concern about on or more of the following intertwined but separable
problems:

 1. policies for the current mode of operation do not map to today's
    real requirements, or are unreasonable

 2. there is no reasonable response time, things get delayed or even
    lost

 3. the InterNIC is a US Federal instrument which makes them bad by
    definition

Really fixing issue (1.) will require more than "I don't like X," it
will require deriving solid guidelines with community consensus, and
that take the global picture and its future evolution into account. I
think it would be great is people would create better guidelines and
get the service providers etc. to sign off on it. I suspect best would
be a consolidated position coming from the IEPG, perhaps with NANOG
taking the first cut?

Issue (2.) I suspect to be a resource issue. May be the InterNIC should
be held more accountable for their actions and submit weekly status
reports (perhaps automatically generated?) or so of what they did. That
would at least help for a better understanding of the work volume.
Above and beyond that, I think the InterNIC registration service is run
by a private for profit corporation, under contract to NSF. They will
likely take money from private corporations to be used for allocating
more resources to the handling of commercial requests.  Why don't you
all just fund a staff person (or however many it takes) for commercial
service providers there, and make them accountable to your
requirements? Also, how long does it take to get an Ethernet Type
field or a 3 byte Ethernet address prefix? Who does that these days?
IEEE?

(3.) is perhaps harder, as we are dealing with perceptions here. I am
not convinced that anyone is purposely trying to interfere with the
requirements of private industry. I suspect it more to be a lack of
guidelines with consensus, and general resources. Again, the RS is a
private corporation, and in and of itself not "bad." Obviously there is
a need for central coordination, and that may require more than one
thinks at first, in terms of resources. Are you all prepared to pick
that up? Would you, e.g., be willing to offer to NSF to pick up the
InterNIC funding and make the RS accountable to private industry?