If the BGP peering side of the business can sort out all of this stuff, then why can't the email side of the business do the same, or perhaps, do even better?
It's not comparable, as has been explained several times to you.
Perhaps you have never been involved in BGP peering? Let me explain what the BGP peering side of the business does, in addition to operating BGP sessions with peers. To start with, most ISPs don't start peering until after they have negotiated and agreement. Those agreements are legal contracts with many pages specifying the responsibilities of the two parties, limits on how the technology is to be applied, SLAs, processes for interoperation and communication between NOCs, i.e. the people protocols. The thousands of bilateral BGP peering contracts are most definitely comparable to the email peering that I am proposing. I have seen many of these contracts in companies that I worked for in the past. They are rather similar to one another in many ways. Since the total number of BGP peers is rather small, it is quite workable to let these contracts evolve to some sort of rough standard and that is what has happened. In the email world, there are many, many more players, and some kind of secret sauce is essential to converge bilateral email peering agreements to some kind of community standard rather than letting evolution take its course and risking chaos as a result. The stuff that you call RIR sauce, is what I would call "open and public negotiation" in some kind of a forum which is not biased or dominated by parties who may have some market dominance. It is, in fact, the antithesis of a model with a few big actors. It is also a model that works, more or less, in other industries. The FCC is one example imposed by government. The RIRs is another example formed from the ground up. There is more than one way to do this. Which would you prefer as a role model, the FCC or ARIN? --Michael Dillon P.S. ARIN itself has absolutely nothing to do with email services and is unlikely to get involved in this in any way. I am using them mainly as a successful example of an open public organization that manages a common resource.