On Fri, 20 May 94 17:32:13 BST you said:
One point I'd suggest though -- I don't believe it would be realistic to expect a uniform charge across Europe. As with everything else in life, costs will vary from country to country. One discussion point will be
Yes - agreed Bob, we've already this problem in many pan-European projects. Trying to explain why overheads are different from PT to DE is not easy.
whether one wants the idea of free competition across Europe, with customers "shopping around" (the Maastricht ideal, I suppose), or a situation where customers aren't "allowed" to apply in other than their own country (ie regulation, or a cartel, depending on your view.) If the latter then there's an interesting consequence of what to do if a one country's Last Resort Registry starts charging unreasonably high prices ... this is a problem that hasn't been solved yet in the well known area of line provision!
In the case of IP numbers and domains one can sort of argue that a certain monopolistic type structure is required for technical reasons (cidr, tlds etc.) - how long this holds if we have competing pan-European or global service providers is crystal ball stuff.
Imagine the havoc it would play on CIDR if everyone shopped around to save a few ECUs on an IP address. RIPE could come out with a recommendation range, i.e. $10-$30 per class C.
Not possible Hank - I don't believe RIPE should try to regulate markets, assuming such a market were to emerge. But you're right - it'll play havoc with cidr if such a market does emerge before IPng gets widely implemented, available and installed. How is NSAP allocation done in other European countries ? I know that here in DE one obtains NSAP for around 32ecu per NSAP per year. Does this compare and is there some sort of international (european agreement on this) - I doubt it ?
Could be an interesting discussion.... Indeed.
Bob Day
Hank Nussbacher
Dave