John - you do not get it...
vadim, i assure you curran gets it. he has been around as long as you and i. the problem is that he has become a fiduciary of an organization which sees its survival and growth as its principal goal, free business class travel for wannabe policy wonks as secondary, and and the well- being of the internet as tertiary. they're just another itu, except the clothing expenses are lower and the decision making process pretends to be more open, but isn't. and the drying up of the free source of integers which they lease to us for hefty fees is pretty scary to these organizations. and, as they were kinda forced to give out /32s in ipv6 space or be seen to be inhibiting the deployment of ipv6, a lot of folk will not be coming back for more v6 for a loooong while. so the rirs are desperately seeking means whereby they can suck more blood from the industry. and the industry blood is getting thinner and thinner, with the telcos redirecting their margin destroying talents from voice to data. how much should we be forced to pay for leasing integers that came for free? how much is the actual registry work (whois and in-addr) worth and why does a larger prefix cost more? the registry financial scam has never been adjusted for reality. and why in hell would i trust these organizations with any control of my routing via rpki certification? they have always said thay would never be involved in routing, but if they control the certification chain, they have a direct stranglehold they can use to extort fees. when the registry work was re-competed and taken from sri to netsol (i think it was called that at the time), rick adams [0] put in a no cost bid to do it all with automated scripts. hindsight tells me we should have supported that much more strongly. and folk who think that would not have scaled, need to know that the netsol lowball solution was mark and scott in a basement with a sun3 and a 56k line. if the iana could get out from under lawyers and domainer greed, and go back to simply being bookkeeper for the internet, they could do the automated solution today. well, with some months of setup. and we could get rid of 95% of the costs the rirs are sucking from our thinning bloodstreams. or a gutsy rir could lead the way. fat chance. randy -- [0] - for the n00bs, rick founded uunet but took his winnings and got out before the real slime got in.