On May 29, 2012, at 3:01 PM, David Conrad wrote:
Sigh. As much as I might enjoy challenging the hairsplitting and revisionism you wish to engage in, I'll pass this time. Perhaps we can just agree to disagree that historically, the RIRs stated that they "have nothing to do with routing" (since I'm sure you'll just continue to ignore the use of the active verb as opposed to the noun "routability").
David - I do not claim to know the practices of all of the RIRs, but in the ARIN region we've been very clear to state that ARIN does not control routing of address blocks, specifically - "Polices must allow for aggregation of Internet number resources in a hierarchical manner to permit the routing scalability which is necessary for proper Internet routing. However, polices cannot guarantee routability of any particular Internet number resource as that is dependent on the actions of the individual Internet operators." Saying that RIRs "do not control routing of address blocks" is very different from saying "have nothing do with routing", and in fact ARIN has several sections in number resource policy which consider routing implications. You said "All the RIRs have said [that they have nothing to do with routing]" but that definitely isn't the case with ARIN either past or present, and could't be for any RIR which has a policy which considers state of routing or intended routing in address policy (as anticipated in RFC 2050, in ARIN NRPM AS & multihome policy, as exists in RIPE 196, etc.) Thanks, /John John Curran President and CEO ARIN