At 03:41 PM 10/6/98 -0700, David R. Conrad wrote:

Michael,

...

My advice in this instance would be to sue Sprint for antitrust violations because if you win then you get triple damages awarded and Sprint definitely has the bank account to pay out on the award. Forget the registries. They are just trying to do the best they can in the awkward situation that was created by Sprint.

Wow. You're _really_ confused.

The situation wasn't created by Sprint, it was created by the lack of self control on the part of the other ISPs. Remember when the filters were first instituted. Remember the growth of the routing tables. Remember the maximum routing load the routers back then could handle.

The registries _relied_ on Sprint's filters to give some teeth to "it's a real good idea to go to your upstream". Sprint (read: Sean Doran) was the ONLY isp to have the cajones to risk outrage to try to limit the proliferation of long prefixes. If it wasn't for Sprint's filters, there

AGIS used to have a page that stated the same routing filter policy as Sprint's. -Hank

would have been only registry whining as back pressure limiting the allocation of provider independent prefixes. Geuss what: whining wasn't particularly effective. RIPE-NCC and APNIC instituted fees for cost recovery, and these had the side effect to limit organizations approaching those registries for resources. InterNIC (at the time) was not able to follow suit. Given the IAB's RFC 1814, there was _very_ little that discouraged every Tom, Dick, and Mary consisting of two modems in a dorm room that called themselves an "ISP" (or not) from demanding address space from InterNIC. With the unilateral imposition of filters by Sprint there was concrete evidence that prefixes longer than /19 were perhaps not a good idea, thereby encouraging folk to go to their upstreams thus limiting the proliferation of long prefixes.

Yeah, let's sue.

Frankly, with comments like this, I feel Sprint is approaching terminal stupidity for keeping the filters in place. I'm sure they have a lovely business case for keeping the filters active (or they wouldn't have lasted this long), but at some point, natural selection has to be allowed to function. I also think the registries should actually be registries and not try to be the Internet's mommy. Internet service providers (or those who think they are Internet service providers) ought to clean up their own messes for a change instead of relying on Sprint and the registries to do it for them. After all, everyone has a god-given inalienable right to portable addresses, no?

Disgustedly, -drc