Authority

Wed Dec 10 22:37:11 UTC 2003

>i am just curious... do you have any authority/commission from arin (or
>anyone else)? 

>this is certainly not flame bait, but it is an honest question.   you're
>very self-righteous, and although you may have valid points (i withold
>judgement) i really want to know what gives you the right/authority to 
say
>the things you say about others.

Honest question, honest answer.

You seem to be looking for a command and control hierarchy where
none exists. This is more like a free market economy of ideas
and projects. In other words, anyone can start up something and
offer it to the networking community. Projects succeed or fail
based on whether they find market acceptance within the economy
of ideas. Please note that this free market economy of ideas is
not the same thing as the free market economy of commerce; it just
shares some of the same patterns.

William is not alone here. Paul Vixie started MAPS in the same way,
i.e. he had no authority to do it but just offered it to the economy
of ideas. And Paul's entrepreneurial inclination have led him to do
other projects in the commercial economy, some of which started life
in the economy of ideas. Rob Thomas's Cymru project is another example
and the various route server and IRR projects are also examples. Nobody
gave the IRR people the authority to manage BGP4 routes; they just
thought it was a good idea and offered it in the economy of ideas.

Many Internet exchange points started life in the same way and 
I believe there are still a lot of smaller ones that exist in
the economy of ideas, i.e. non-commercial.

I may not agree with everything that William does or how he goes
about it, but I do think that his approach is worthwhile.
It gives us a chance to see a prototype of something that could
be either incorporated into ARIN or commercialized in the future.

By the way, ARIN, and the IANA before it, both started life in
the economy of ideas. The only reason that ARIN is in the position
that it now holds is that the networking community liked what they
saw and supported it. There really was no "authority" that created
ARIN. There was a lot of initiative from members of the networking
community who lobbied the various power brokers of the time to
demonstrate that ISPs supported an address resgistry that was 
entirely independent from domain name registries. Once it became
clear that the only dissenters came from outside the industry
and were confusing addressing and domain name issues, those groups
who felt that they had authority in the matter, blessed the plans
to create ARIN, and we went ahead with it. Even here, there was no
command and control that gave ARIN its commission. On the contrary,
there was a lot of bottom-up pressure that finally coalesced and
ARIN was obviously the right thing to do.

--Michael Dillon (one of the original members of the ARIN Advisory 
Council)