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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: [Fwd: Kremen VS Arin Antitrust Lawsuit - Anyone have feedback?]
> > Your statement about preferential treatment is factually > > incorrect. Larger ARIN members do not get larger allocations. > > It is the larger network infrastructures that get the larger > > allocations which is not directly tied to the size of the > > company. Yes, larger companies often have larger infrastructures. > > And that's the point: A company that is established gets preferential > treatment over one that is not; that is called a barrier to entry by the > anti-trust crowd. You need to understand the basics of networking to see that this is NOT preferential treatment but is instead even-handed treatment. You see, a network is a collection of devices interconnected with circuits. Each point where a circuit connects to a device is called an interface. Devices may have more than one interface. Typically, the devices used by network operators have many interfaces. IP addresses are numbers used to uniquely identify such interfaces and the Internet Protocol (IP) requires that these numbers be assigned in a structured manner. It is then obvious that larger networks have more interfaces and therefore can TECHNICALLY justify more addresses. This is even-handed treatment even though small companies end up with less addresses than large companies. >You may feel that such a barrier is justified and > fair, but those on the other side of it (or more importantly, their > lawyers) are likely to disagree. Yes, lawyers do not understand networks. No doubt some of them will read the above text and begin to get a glimmer of understanding. > Of course it's directly connected; all you have to do is look at the > current fee schedule and you'll see: > > /24 = $4.88/IP > /23 = $2.44/IP That is completely untrue. ARIN's web page here http://www.arin.net/billing/fee_schedule.html says nothing of the sort. In fact, ARIN's annual fees are structure so that organizations which have a larger transaction volume pay a larger fee. These transactions could be IP address applications or SWIP transactions or in-addr.arpa traffic. The size categories are just a rough rule of thumb for categorizing organizations that has been accepted by the ARIN members themselves. > So, just between the two ends of the fee schedule, we have a difference > of _two orders of magnitude_ in how much an registrant pays divided by > how much address space they get. Large organizations get their allocations bit by bit, applying for 3-6 months requirements at a time. Small organizations may have only a single allocation. > Besides the above, Kremen also points out that larger prefixes are more > likely to be routed, therefore refusing to grant larger prefixes (which > aren't justified, in ARIN's view) is another barrier to entry. Again, > since the folks deciding these policies are, by and large, folks who are > already major players in the market, it's easy to put an anticometitive > slant on that. Routability decisions are not made by ARIN. If anyone is unhappy with routability they should be suing those organizations which recommend route filtering. But they would have to prove that the route filtering is not technically justified which will be difficult when all the expert witnesses are on the other side. --Michael Dillon
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