[YA] Fwd: Class B Purchase

Tue Oct 6 23:00:35 UTC 1998

On Tue, 6 Oct 1998, David R. Conrad wrote:

[somewhat irrelevant history lesson deleted]

> Yeah, let's sue.  
> 
> Frankly, with comments like this, I feel Sprint is approaching terminal
> stupidity for keeping the filters in place. 

This is precisely my point. History is nice but it lives in the past. We
live in today and Sprint's filters are a pretty clear indication that
Sprint's management believes it can get away with manipulating the market.
Smart managers would have gotten rid of those filters when the technical
necessity for them disappeared. Smart managers would have sat down with
their industry colleagues in a neutral forum like ARIN and made sure that
their *TECHNICAL* policies were in sync with the need for stability and
managed change. The policies that once were technical policies instituted
by Sean Doran are no longer technical policies but a crass manipulation of
the marketplace to Sprint's advantage as the archives of this list prove
quite amply.

> I'm sure they have a lovely
> business case for keeping the filters active (or they wouldn't have lasted
> this long)

Indeed they do. Just look at the archives of this list. Someone complains
about not being able to get a /19 and they are advised to make sure that
one of their upstreams is Sprint. This is a clear violation of antitrust
laws and Sprint management knows this fact and although they were advised
4 months ago to get rid of the filters, they have not acted.

> I also think the registries should actually be registries and
> not try to be the Internet's mommy.

IMHO it is part of an IP registry's job to make sure that applications for
IP address space meet the publicly agreed upon criteria. And if that
criteria says that you need to justify the quantity of addresses you
receive, it may be mommy work but it is necessary work. But I want to know
why ARIN cannot simply issue an appropriately sized portable block of
addresses to anyone who is legitimately multihomed? Why can't ARIN
maintain a register of companies who are multihomed and tag their IP
allocations, of whatever size, as "portable". I suppose we could sidestep
Sprint and use the swamp addresses which Sprint filters on a /24 boundary.
But why can't we just carve off a chunk of 214/8 and "register" it to
organizations who need portable space in chunks smaller than /19?

This just makes too much sense to me.

--
Michael Dillon                 -               E-mail: michael at memra.com
Check the website for my Internet World articles -  http://www.memra.com        