Owen, On Jan 8, 2011, at 8:56 PM, Owen DeLong wrote:
I suspect part of the issue is that ARIN is a monopoly provider of a variety public services that folks unrelated (directly) to ARIN must make use of. In other areas of public service provision, there are things like public utilities commissions that (in theory) ensure the monopoly service provider acts in the public benefit when services are added/changed/deleted. My impression is that the various WGs and SIGs in the other RIRs perform something similar to that function. There doesn't appear to be anything similar in the ARIN region.
In ARIN, there are things like BoT elections and the BoT very much fulfills the role of the PUC as you describe above.
Well, ARIN BoT members are fiduciarily responsible for ARIN. PUC members, to my understanding, are responsible to the public. In my experience on ARIN's board, the key role of the board was to ensure the public policy process was followed, not oversight of how public services are provided. However, things might have changed -- that was some time ago.
People can submit requests for operational changes to ARIN through the ACSP and in my experience they get a good review and comment period by the community
Which community? ARIN or NANOG?
and the board listens to these things and responds appropriately.
Somewhat as an aside, I'm a bit surprised the board would get involved at the level of detail this implies. I would've thought how public services are to be provided would be an operational decision made by the ARIN CEO/staff and that the board would only get involved to ensure sufficient resources were available.
Especially if a suggestion receives significant support, it tends to get implemented.
My impression of the concern is that the definition of support and decisions regarding what gets implemented are made within a subset of the network operations community. Regards, -drc