North American Network Operators Group

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Re: [YA] Fwd: Class B Purchase

  • From: David R. Conrad
  • Date: Tue Oct 06 23:18:46 1998

Michael,

>My advice in this instance would be to sue Sprint for antitrust violations
>because if you win then you get triple damages awarded and Sprint
>definitely has the bank account to pay out on the award. Forget the
>registries. They are just trying to do the best they can in the awkward
>situation that was created by Sprint. 

Wow.  You're _really_ confused.

The situation wasn't created by Sprint, it was created by the lack of self
control on the part of the other ISPs.  Remember when the filters were
first instituted.  Remember the growth of the routing tables.  Remember the
maximum routing load the routers back then could handle.

The registries _relied_ on Sprint's filters to give some teeth to "it's a
real good idea to go to your upstream".  Sprint (read: Sean Doran) was the
ONLY isp to have the cajones to risk outrage to try to limit the
proliferation of long prefixes.   If it wasn't for Sprint's filters, there
would have been only registry whining as back pressure limiting the
allocation of provider independent prefixes.  Geuss what:  whining wasn't
particularly effective.  RIPE-NCC and APNIC instituted fees for cost
recovery, and these had the side effect to limit organizations approaching
those registries for resources.  InterNIC (at the time) was not able to
follow suit.  Given the IAB's RFC 1814, there was _very_ little that
discouraged every Tom, Dick, and Mary consisting of two modems in a dorm
room that called themselves an "ISP" (or not) from demanding address space
from InterNIC.  With the unilateral imposition of filters by Sprint there
was concrete evidence that prefixes longer than /19 were perhaps not a good
idea, thereby encouraging folk to go to their upstreams thus limiting the
proliferation of long prefixes.

Yeah, let's sue.  

Frankly, with comments like this, I feel Sprint is approaching terminal
stupidity for keeping the filters in place.  I'm sure they have a lovely
business case for keeping the filters active (or they wouldn't have lasted
this long), but at some point, natural selection has to be allowed to
function.  I also think the registries should actually be registries and
not try to be the Internet's mommy.  Internet service providers (or those
who think they are Internet service providers) ought to clean up their own
messes for a change instead of relying on Sprint and the registries to do
it for them.  After all, everyone has a god-given inalienable right to
portable addresses, no?

Disgustedly,
-drc