Announcing APNIC IP's in ARIN region

Tue Sep 25 15:29:32 UTC 2012

On Sep 25, 2012, at 2:05 AM, Wayne E Bouchard <web at typo.org> wrote:
> It presents no technical problem but has always been considered
> politically inadvisable. I mean, there are multiple registries for a
> reason that goes beyond mere oranization and load sharing.

Always? Actually, no.

Back when the RIRs were first starting up, we pushed multinationals to obtain their addresses from the RIR that served the region in which their headquarters were located. The theory was that a single RIR would be better able to ensure addresses were used efficiently and it was more likely routing announcements could be limited. I personally got into a long argument with folks from Shell who wanted addresses from APNIC for their AP region networks and were displeased when I pushed them to RIPE-NCC ("Royal Dutch Shell", headquarters in The Hague). I believe Geert Jan DeGroot at RIPE-NCC (who tended to be a stickler for those sorts of things) got into similar arguments with folks from Mitsubishi in Europe.

Of course, the cynical might suggest that over time, such niceties as conserving address space and routing slots would, of course, take a lower priority to marking territory and RIR revenues, but who would be that cynical?

Regards,
-drc