North American Network Operators Group
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Re: size of the routing table is a big deal, especially in IPv6

  • From: Hank Nussbacher
  • Date: Tue Nov 30 03:10:58 2004 
At 08:14 PM 29-11-04 -0800, Tony Li wrote:
In the decentralized world of the Internet, we have a bigger problem in that we do not have a clear entity that impose the necessary regulatory pressures and there is no commercial pressure. All we can do is to ask people to be good Internet citizens and to act locally for the global good. The challenge, of course, is that this is in almost no one's immediate best interest.

My preferred solution at this point is for the UN to take over management of the entire Internet and for them to issue a policy of one prefix per country. This will have all sorts of nasty downsides for national providers and folks that care about optimal routing, but it's the only way that I can see that will allow the Internet to continue to operate over the long term.
Before going to the UN (and I assume you mean the ITU), I would prefer to see ICANN+IANA+RIRs do the necessary work involved. That means that in addition to allocating IP blocks to ISPs and end customers, to also police said resources. It is always mentioned that IP blocks are not "bought" or "owned" but "leased" out by the RIRs. If an ISP is polluting the commons, then the RIR that allocated the IP resource should first contact the customer. If the customer doesn't mend their ways, then the RIR should be free to start announcing that IP block and static route it to some RIR blackhole. That would definitely get the attention of the wayward ISP/customer. Of course all this would have to be backed up by IAB+IETF as well, but I think we should learn to police ourselves before we ask for the UN/ITU to do it for us.

-Hank