"Leasing" of space via non-connectivity providers

Peter Maccauley petermaccauley at yahoo.com
Mon Feb 7 18:27:29 UTC 2011


All this talk of ARIN's power and rights versus others is rather despairing. I 
will now explain what we, a  'non-connectivity' ISP, are providing as useful 
service.

Many of customers value anonymity/pseudonymity. We can provide these things. 
Sure, there is a great potential for abuse, but we take steps to prevent this, 
such as careful control over port 25.

Our customers can appear on the net from one of several IPv4 addresses in 
various places, which can be used for testing location-based services. Yes, this 
could be abused.

We can aggregate broadband connections at our router, or provide instant 
switchover. This is useful for various people and organizations which have to 
use low-grade broadband (consumer quality, or often consumer quality relabeled 
'business' and sold at a higher price).

We find a way for people to use their legacy space. A few hobbyist types with 
their legacy Class Cs are customers.

We've managed to get around some censorship blocks. Private http proxies to 
facebook/youtube and other less-known sites have an IP in some of our space. 
This is not saying these named organizations are our customers (nor am I saying 
they are not).

We remain quiet at the moment because we do not have the infrastructure in place 
to handle any more traffic than the people who have found out about us by 
word-of-mouth. Maintaining a low profile also allows us to escape being added to 
lists of those censors of one type or another. It has allowed us to avoid 
spammers, thieves and crackers as customers

I hope that many of you will see our use of IP space as a legitimate one. Like 
many of the rest of you, we provide services which may be valuable to 
spammers/crackers, but this doesn't mean we're in bed with them. If ARIN/RIPE 
etc ever decide to edit their databases in a way that interferes with our 
valuable services, I hope that some of you will raise an alarm in our defense.



      


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