On Apr 8, 2010, at 2:51 PM, Kevin Stange wrote:
On 04/08/2010 01:47 PM, Dorn Hetzel wrote:
If there was an automatic website that just handed out up to a /40 on demand, and charged a one-time fee of $100, I don't think the space would ever be exhausted, there isn't enough money.
I'd hate to see that routing table.
Another bright gentleman many years ago suggested that we have an online website which allows anyone to pay a fee and get an address block. This is not inconceivable, but does completely set aside hierarchical routing which is currently an underlying mechanism for making our addressing framework scalable. Another way to accomplish this would be a functional global model for the settlement of costs relating to routing entries, and which would effectively be against routing entries caused by unique "provider-independent" prefixes. ISPs today don't get specifically compensated for routing a PI address block, but they do get to participate in the various RIR processes and have some say in the impacts of public policies as they are discussed. Historically, this has proved to be sufficient input that ISPs generally respect the tradeoffs inherent in the approved policy, and will route the result. If you have an economic mechanism which handles this function instead, and an abundance of resources (e.g. IPv6), then it might be possible to operate under very different assumptions than the present Internet registry system, and the resulting costs of operating the registry portion could be minimal. The implementation of this is left as an exercise for the reader... /John p.s. These are my personal thoughts only and in no way reflect any position of ARIN or the ARIN Board of Trustees. I provide them solely to help outline some of the tradeoffs inherent in the current Registry system.