From a practical point of view as a service provider, I would assume my customer would not be pleased to be assigned an address that prevented them from communicating with anyone on the Internet that wants to communicate with them. We can debate the details of who does what but every network operator will have to deal with their own customer. If they have an address block assigned to them, they will most likely want me to route it as well as work with any other service provider to ensure that they can get where they need to go. For example, if one of my customers cannot get to anyone on AT&T or Comcast they will expect me to solve the issue for them.
As the customer's single point of contact with the Internet we effectively have to deal with all of their issues even if they are caused by another service provider. All the ISPs raise your hand, if you were assigned a block of address space by ARIN or RIPE and you could not globally route it, would you be upset? Of course there are times I want a globally unique address space and do not want to route it but the whole point of being globally unique is that I would like the option to route it if I wanted to. The requirement for globally unique but non-routable space is most definitely an edge case, not the norm. Steven Naslund -----Original Message----- From: Cutler James R [mailto:james.cutler@consultant.com] Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2012 10:36 AM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: RIRs give out unique addresses (Was: something has a /8! ...) On Sep 20, 2012, at 10:56 AM, "Naslund, Steve" <SNaslund@medline.com> wrote:
Wouldn't you say that there is a very real expectation that when you request address space through ARIN or RIPE that it would be routable?
I certainly would not say that. I would say that I get addresses from the RIRs to avoid address collisions with other network operators using the same approach. And, please note this well, address collisions affect more than Layer three routing. See all the previous mentions of application gateways. James R. Cutler james.cutler@consultant.com