On Monday, November 18, 1996 2:28 PM, Michael Dillon[SMTP:michael@memra.com] wrote: @ On Mon, 18 Nov 1996, George Herbert wrote: @ @ > This should not be happening. Matthew should not have to fly out @ > to Virginia to tell someone at InterNIC face to face what he's been @ > saying in email. @ @ I agree. But this is business and businesses are based on personal @ relationships with key suppliers and customers. The Internic IP registry @ is a key supplier for any large ISP and that means if they have not @ developped a relationship with the IP registry people during their early @ days, they will run into this sort of problem when they need the IP @ registry's help. @ Hmmm...develop a relationship...are people getting married ? or just trying to get a government clerk to assign some numbers ? If people are going to develop a relationship, maybe they should be attending meetings like the following that was reported in the October 1996 Internet Monthly Report. Of course to do that, they would have to be notified. You should note that no notes or minutes are included, just the following brief mention. @@@@ ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/imr/imr9610.txt IP Support Kim Hubbard met with Jon Postel (IANA), David Conrad (APNIC) and Daniel Karrenberg (RIPE) in California to discuss IP issues. @@@@@@ Anyone that has not figured out by now that the Internet is a country club like place where you have the "haves" and the "have nots", and the "right people" and the "wrong people" and people with relationships and those without, then you have not looked very closely at the system. One would hope that the "system" had been designed to accommodate an expanding number of people helping to provide the infrastructure and the commitments needed to protect some of the precious natural resources of the Internet. In my opinion, the technical system *has* been designed this way, but the *people* system has not. What we now see evolving is a system which does not protect the natural resources of the Internet but instead operates to protect the "people resources" of the Internet. Rather than focusing on the "relationships" of routers and networks, and routing tables and IP allocations, we are focusing on relationships of people. Actually, the people do not probably matter as much as the money they represent. More and more people are suggesting that non-Internet meetings be used to solve problems. More and more, people are talking about jet setting around the world to participate in forums. Why ? Because only those people with the money can participate. The barrier to entry is being raised to make sure that only the "right" people get in. The Internet is not being used effectively by the people who are designing systems to "exclude" people, rather than "include" them. I predict that all of this will lead to a new generation of teachers, students, inventors, citizens, and government officials building a true Internet using the current network as a base. People are not going to continue to tolerate being oppressed by these policies and systems which are designed to favor a small elite group of people at the expense of the performance of the network. The focus needs to shift back to the relationships of natural Internet resources and the fragile eco-system that is required to keep things working. -- Jim Fleming UNETY Systems, Inc. Naperville, IL e-mail: JimFleming@unety.net JimFleming@unety.net.s0.g0 (EDNS/IPv8)