Geoff, I've read your article and thanks for sharing your observation. Your classification of registry's role and how it will change before and after the IPv4 exhaustion(RIRs' pool becomes unavailable) was interesting and helpful in clearly identifying what the remaining role for RIR will be. While I agree that effectiveness of regulation is linked to specific benefits (in the case of current situation, ISPs follow RIR policies because they need to receive subsequent allocations from RIR), I'm not sure how RIRs' role of regulation will completely disappear after IPv4 exhaustion. If transfer will be the new mean to obtain additional IPv4 address space, and if RIR is the authority to register transfer records, wouldn't this act as an incentive for LIRs to follow RIR policies? RIRs' role simply switches from making allocations to reconizing transfer, i.e. LIRs will not be allowed to transfer their records (obtain IPv4 address space) if they don't follow RIR policies. You mention that there may be alternative registries that provides easier transfer without any contraints, and some people may indeed set up such registry, but I don't quite see how people will immediately trust an alternative registry to replace RIR registry. To put it in short, as long as some means of obtaining IPv4 address is accomodated (in this case, transfer of already distributed space), I'm not sure if people will go as far as breaking as in your assumption, even if some degree of contraints are added. Just my thoughts on reading your paper. izumi JPNIC Geoff Huston wrote:
Hi,
At the ARIN meeting last week the question arose as to why the various policy proposals related to address transfers in the different RIRs were so different. I made some comments in response to this question from my perspective and then I had some followup questions mailed to me, so I thought maybe there is some value in writing my perspective up.
If you are interested its at: http://www.potaroo.net/ispcol/2008-11/transfers.html
thanks,
Geoff Huston
DIsclaimer: I'm speaking for myself, again!