On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 04:15:11PM +0100, Andreas Bäß/Denic wrote:
Request For An IPv4/IPv6 Policy Allowing Assignments For Network Critical Infrastructure I strictly oppose anything that has "Assignments For Network Critical Infrastructure" in its title.
I think you are wrong here. The important part of this proposal is the critical infrastructure. Anycast is a technical solution and it can be used for unimportant things as well.
NB: the other 3 RIR's "critical infrastructure" policies are just broken by design - what's special about ARIN's or ICANN's network, as opposed to the network that runs google.com? I'd say Google is much more critical to the average network user...
DNS services are critical infrastructure, especially top level domain services. You might argue that it would be better for all top level domains to pool their resources and share the same anycast architecture and I would probably agree with you. But I believe that the .de DNS service is far more important than Google's search engine because if the .de service is unavailable then no-one will be able to resolve google.de so the search engine will become unreachable. I agree that the other RIR policies may not be a good example for RIPE to follow. Sometimes RIPE can do things better. Personally I would rather have seen DENIC propose a simple policy text and then explain why. That might be easier to discuss than a request for someone else to write the policy text. Suggestion... RIPE will allocate /24 blocks from the IPv4 address range that was once called "Class C" address space for use by services that are part of the Internet's critical infrastructure. These blocks are for services that will exist for the forseeable future, are used freely by many organizations, and are likely to outlive the lifetime of the organization currently operating the service. I think that .de nameservice meets this criteria. The .de DNS will exist forever, anybody can use it without subscribing or registering, and if DENIC ceased to exist, some other organization would take over the responsibility of hosting .de. --Michael Dillon