Michael and all, By the definitions you are attempting to quote, it would seem to me that many ISp's would fit as well as Google and other public/private services on the net provide or offer.
I believe that your argumentation holds; "critical infrastructure" is something very personal, and "public"...what's public? Isn't google a public service, too? Or Yahoo? Or ebay? Or ...
People seem to be confused about the meaning of "critical infrastructure" so I decided to see what Google has to say. The first thing it comes up with is an American government organization called the Department for Homeland Security. On their question and answer page they say this: http://www.ciao.gov/publicaffairs/qsandas.htm
1.) What is a critical infrastructure?
The USA Patriot Act defines critical infrastructures as those "systems and assets, whether physical or virtual, so vital to the United States that the incapacity or destruction of such systems and assets would have a debilitating impact on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of those matters."
That's not something very personal. It is something that is important to a large number of people.
Here's another one: http://www.atis.org/tg2k/_critical_infrastructure.html
critical infrastructure: 1. Elements of a system that are so vital that disabling any of them would incapacitate the entire system.
Disabling .de would make the Internet unusable for millions of people in Germany and would affect millions of German-speaking people around the world.
When some part of the infrastructure of the Internet is considered to be critical, the people responsible for it will build it so that it can never fail. They do this by applying fault tolerance techniques. Anycasting DNS is a fault tolerance technique. DENIC is asking for a policy that understands the need for fault tolerance when an organization is managing part of the Internet's critical infrastructure.
If this policy focuses on the fault tolerance technique then it is doing the wrong things. Policies are not about technology. RIPE policies are political agreements that balance the needs of everyone in the RIPE community. This policy needs to focus on defining which kinds of "critical infrastructure" are important enough for the whole community to justify special allocations.
Es gibt Luegen, verdammte Luegen und RIPE-141(-219)-Netzantraege.
Translated: There are lies, damned lies and RIPE-141 request forms.
--Michael Dillon
Regards, -- Jeffrey A. Williams Spokesman for INEGroup LLA. - (Over 134k members/stakeholders strong!) "Be precise in the use of words and expect precision from others" - Pierre Abelard "If the probability be called P; the injury, L; and the burden, B; liability depends upon whether B is less than L multiplied by P: i.e., whether B is less than PL." United States v. Carroll Towing (159 F.2d 169 [2d Cir. 1947] =============================================================== CEO/DIR. Internet Network Eng. SR. Eng. Network data security Information Network Eng. Group. INEG. INC. E-Mail jwkckid1@ix.netcom.com Contact Number: 214-244-4827 or 214-244-3801