On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 07:25:56PM +0000, Nathan Eisenberg said:
But the reality is that you asserted your intention to follow those guidelines when you requested the allocation, did you not?
If an upstream accepts announcements from a revoked block, what is to stop them from accepting announcements for an unallocated block? I realize this precariously borders on committing a slippery slope fallacy, but I think it's a valid question to ask - a provider is either 'in compliance' with the guidelines, or 'not in compliance' with them. Once you're 'not in compliance' a little bit, how can I have a valid trust relationship with you about the rest of it?
There's a difference - once the upstream is hooked on the revenue stream they're not going to want to interfere with it. They might pass along some threats from ARIN and/or levy their own, but I doubt they'd seriously make good on it and cut their own hand off and lose the revenue. That's for a deallocated block that was in good standing originally - this assumes the contract for transit with the upstream included someone there ensuring that the block was properly/legally allocated, and WHOIS/RADB/Swip/yadda and everything else was properly notated and setup. Going from good standing with a revenue stream for some months/years to bad is different from accepting a bogon customer at the very start of the arrangement. Lots of things would not lineup with a minimum of due dilligence, and I suspect that most providers with any ethical slant will refuse to provide service (scenario screams 'SPAMMER!' for one). That's alot different from shutting off a revenue stream that was working well (sans spam) for a year or more prior.
following a corporation (yes, ARIN is a corporation) as if you were a sheep will empower them to do precisely this in the future.
There's no sheepism here. The proposed situation represents a valid reason for revoking address space under the community developed guidelines. I don't see the problem with following those guidelines, do you?
The reality is that following the guidelines is psychologically difficult in harder times as we're experiencing now. Without any real repercussions for the upstream for NOT cutting off the customer, balanced against the existing revenue stream from the delinquent (assuming they're not delinquent with their transit provider as well), it's not a hard calculation. I dont see much 'community' fallout occurring either, or we'd see it on this list. A few transit providers have very poor reputations in the community (y'all know who they are), and personally I won't purchase from them, but certainly none of them have garnered this reputation by not cutting off ARIN delinquents. It's just not publically available data - I dont think ARIN publishes this as I said, and if they did I suspect it'd be a pretty busy-yet-boring mailing list (with alot of screaming and name calling if it was open to public posting :).
How many large carriers on this list would immediately halt announcing a downstream-in-good-financial-standing's prefixes just because ARIN say's they're delinquent?
That depends. I vote with my wallet. How many carriers want my business, and the business of other customers who (reasonably) expect compliance with the standing policies? Do you want to do business with someone who's willing to break the rules everyone else is playing by?
IS everyone else playing by them? We dont really have data as I mentioned, or I don't at least, so if anyone can provide stats (ARIN? some bulk numbers without naming any names?) that'd be helpful in shaping this dicussion by identifying how large the issue really is. Number of requests to upstreams to halt announcements, and a mean and stddev on days-til-compliance for that action (or how many delinquents were succesfully scared into paying ARIN by an upstream's sternly worded warning would also be interesting). Unfortunately such stats would also be good hard data for gamblers to model the risk/reward profile on continuing to not pay. :) Shades of freakonomics game theory here...
Best Regards, Nathan Eisenberg Atlas Networks, LLC
/kc -- Ken Chase - ken@heavycomputing.ca - +1 416 897 6284 - Toronto CANADA Heavy Computing - Clued bandwidth, colocation and managed linux VPS @151 Front St. W.