On Tue, Nov 19, 2024 at 10:59 AM Tom Beecher <beecher@beecher.cc> wrote:
> What is, in your opinion, the perfect scenario by which the functions of the RIRs today could be structured?  The 'if I could greenfield this today' idea?

Hi Tom,

They'd look more or less like they do today. Rough spots aside, four
of the five are working pretty well.

Most of the changes I would make to the RIRs are small ones. For
example, there are instances of product tying at ARIN which I think
should be eliminated. The contract for RPKI service is tied to having
a contract for address registration service. This is unnecessary and
in my view, counterproductive. A consumer of ARIN RPKI service must be
able to demonstrate lawful possession of the associated address block,
but that shouldn't require holding an ARIN contract for registration
of the same address block.

There are larger changes I would consider, but nothing I would definitely do.

Sometimes the right thing to do and the legally safe thing to do are
not the same. The ARIN RPKI TAL should be available on an as-is basis.
It's not. ARIN stopped demanding a signed contract, but they still
assert that you're bound to a non-trivial contract as a consequence of
using it. Counsel tells us offering it as-is creates a legal risk for
the entire organization. Which impacts the registration services. The
right answer might be forking off a separate corporate entity to
implement RPKI so that they can do the right thing while only creating
legal risk in their specific environment.

For another example, there's a tension between the exigencies of
operating a modern registry and the obligations to so-called legacy
registrants taken on at the dawn of the commercial Internet. One
possible relief would be to fork off a legacy registry and let it
operate its own governance applicable only to those legacy
registrations. Such a registry would inherently overlap the geography
of the others.

Regards,
Bill Herrin

--
William Herrin
bill@herrin.us
https://bill.herrin.us/