Tony Li <tli@cisco.com> writes:
Daniel,
I'm somewhat concerned about the text:
The regional IRs cannot do this because they would face determining who is a service provider and who is not as well as enforcing minimum sizes for address allocations. This would amount to nothing less than the registries regulating Internet service provision. So far no practical policies for these determinations have been suggested let alone met with community consensus.
There is a logical leap here that I'm just not following. Suppose that some organization requests space from an IR. How does knowing whether or not they are an ISP matter? I would submit that the IR must allocate PA (i.e., "leased") address space to the organization regardless of their business status.
You cite out of context. The preceeding paragraph reads: Consequently it has been suggested that the regional IRs should immediately stop allocating and assigning PI space and only allocate PA space to service providers. The word "this" refers to that suggestion which has been made more than once in CIDRD. RFC1518 can easily be interpreted this way too:
6.1 Recommendations for an address allocation plan
We anticipate that public interconnectivity between private routing domains will be provided by a diverse set of TRDs, including (but not necessarily limited to):
- backbone networks (Alternet, ANSnet, CIX, EBone, PSI, SprintLink);
- a number of regional or national networks; and,
- a number of commercial Public Data Networks.
...
For the proposed address allocation scheme, this implies that portions of IP address space should be assigned to each TRD (explicitly including the backbones and regionals). For those leaf routing domains which are connected to a single TRD, they should be assigned a prefix value from the address space assigned to that TRD.
Call them TRDs or large ISPs. I do not see any difference. In this scheme a regional IR will have to determine whether someone is a TRD, which gets their own chunk of PA space, or not. Criteria please! Even if you assume that you know who the TRDs are, and thus can determine who is connected to a single TRD only, you are not there yet: There is a problem with organisations who re-assign address space. Typically ISPs do this. If some of them, let's call them resellers for convenience, were *forced by policy* to use PA space of *their* provider for this, it would solidly lock them into that provider. Any move of provider would cause the reseller to require all its customers to renumber. This just will not fly *as a result of general policy*. Any policy that requires this will be perceived as too restrictive to trade and competition and therefore not be implementable. Of course it can fly if the reseller finds it reasonable for any reason (really small, few customers, much cheaper service from transit provider). The next suggestion then usually is the one you mark as faulty below:
I suspect that the (faulty) thinking here is that folks who ARE an ISP _automatically_ get PI space. This is NOT the intent of what we've been doing, at least as far as I know.
So how do we determine who gets a chunk of PA space *of their own* (note this is subtely different from PI space) and who gets locked into their transit ISP, TRD, ... .
As to practical policies, RFC 1518 outlines some obvious cases (e.g., multihoming) which do deserve PI space. I would hope that this could be the basis of some well-thought out policies.
It is flawed, see above.
I should also point out that no one is going to propose policies other than the IR's. Have fun writing... ;-)
The PIS/PAS draft is a contribution towards this. If we can get agreement about it in the operator's groups and IANA (with IAB etc. behind it) accepts this as a starting point I will be hapy to continue writing. Do not get me wrong: I fully understand the necessity for hierarchy. But there is a fundamental conflict here. Stronger hierarchy leads to: + easy routing + easy address allocation - strong regulation of ISPs - favours (currently) big ISPs - makes the Internet core oriented and more or less static - hinders competition - no incentive to solve difficult routing problems - leads to governmental regulation and control Weaker hierarchy leads to: - difficult routing - somewhat difficult address allocation + reglulation of ISPs not necessary + more dynamics and flexibility in topology + easier for new ISPs to establish themselves at any level + encourages competition + big incentive to solve difficult routing problems + no need for governmental regulation and control We have to find a workable compromise. Daniel