You make it sound like the politics involved in a regulatory/governed setting are different than those involved in a commercial setting. In the end, it's all about economics. I think the UN has enough trouble managing the things it attempts to manage right now. Don't let them try to be technical too! We should have looked at IPv4 and simply added three bits as a prefix to denote continent. Giving lots of Ips in lots of different areas. Of course, then we'd argue about how the Ips for Antartica would get allocated. And then there would be the one leftover set, presumably for outer space. Just in case the United Federation of Planets ever needed to worry about IP address allocation. Gotta plan ahead, right? Same basic problems we've always had, just changing the scale to reflect the times. Technology isn't much different than any other economic/social history in that matter. :) Scott -----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Tony Li Sent: Monday, November 29, 2004 11:14 PM In the decentralized world of the Internet, we have a bigger problem in that we do not have a clear entity that impose the necessary regulatory pressures and there is no commercial pressure. All we can do is to ask people to be good Internet citizens and to act locally for the global good. The challenge, of course, is that this is in almost no one's immediate best interest. My preferred solution at this point is for the UN to take over management of the entire Internet and for them to issue a policy of one prefix per country. This will have all sorts of nasty downsides for national providers and folks that care about optimal routing, but it's the only way that I can see that will allow the Internet to continue to operate over the long term. Tony