On Aug 20, 2011, at 10:29 PM, Tammy A. Wisdom wrote:
I completely agree... the real issue here is the system is flawed and RIPE/ARIN/APNIC etc have zero actual authority over actual routing. Yet another reason they aren't worth the money we flush down the toilet for them to do absolutely nothing. --Tammy
The system is this way BY DESIGN, and any other method would concentrate power which would be detrimental to the internet and counter to its open/consensus driven nature. Whenever power or authority has been concentrated or centralized on the internet, the altruistic objective has almost always been distorted or corrupted to serve for-profit/commercial interests instead of community interests. The domain name system and ICANN is the perfect, iconical example, of why we should never have a single entity with ACTUAL authority over routing. The RIRs' job is to provide unique registrations, nothing else. And registry fees are for recovering costs necessary to provide the service and to maintain addressing policy. Just like the IETF's job is to provide RFCs. But the IETF has no authority to go around to mailservers running certain software, and force them to be turned off for non-compliance with the RFC. _Enforcement_ of RIR allocations is by network operators refusing to originate or propagate announcements by organizations unauthorized by the registered resource holder. So IANA/ARIN/RIPE/APNIC/etc _do_ have an effect on routing policy, it's just an indirect effect that depends on the operator community recognizing them as the IP address registry. -- -JH