Owen DeLong wrote:
Barring a prior agreement, what grounds does any third party have to object?
The argument could be made that some form of prior agreement exists that the legacy holders have already received that assignment under those terms and that the RIRs have accepted a burden to preserve that.
Well I suppose that would be an interesting question that would depend on examining a whole bunch of agreements that may or may not exist and that may or may not have any legal ramification in some jurisidiction or another and that may or may not apply to successors in interest who may or may not actually be successors in interest. Legally speaking, if the registries voluntaried disbanded, thus requiring a new unencumbered entity to rise from the ashes, how could any prior agreement be considered binding?
Thus, your "Barring a prior agreement" condition is not met.
For that matter, aside from consensus and inertia, what would stop the operator community as a whole from setting up shop with a "forked" registry that had no contractual agreements with anybody prior?
Nothing. However, do you really think that is viable? 1. Consensus would be very hard to achieve.
If the current registries are not fulfilling the needs and have become irrelevant, consensus for forking becomes more likely. The only technical lockin I can spot is reverse dns.
2. Identifying a single entity to manage such a "forked" registry vs. a bunch of islands of registration would be even harder.
All such islands would have a vested interest to work together, and thus, they might actually do so, just like all internet network islands do so today.
3. Much breakage and instability would likely result.
Likely not, since any registry wishing to be successfull would be trying their best not to break anything, in other words, RIR allocations would likely be honored/duplicated, but swamp would become fair game.
4. Do you have any illusion that this would do anything other than beg government(s) to try and get involved in regulating address space?
If there is a breakdown in supply, than there will be an opportunity for an entity to step forward, if they can promise supply. If iana free pool runs out and registries cant offer any new ones, whos to say goverments wont start stepping in and "eminent domain"ing address space and setting up registry shop themselves? Consensus is still required. Otherwise its just a national private network, with or without nat. I think the takeaway is that the registries better remain relevant to ipv4 so long as ipv4 is relevant.
Owen