The RIRs are definitely biased towards ISPs, because IP addressing
policy is a core business concern to ISPs but "overhead" to other
companies. The IETF has more vendors but still few end users.
However, there is adequate proof the RIRs can respond to end users'
concerns when anyone cares enough to show up: PIv6 wouldn't have
happened without end-user operators coming out of the woodwork to
support it, overwhelming ISP and IETF resistance. The periodic
flamefests about how to treat legacy space are also demonstrations of
end-user input, though it seems to amount to no more than "leave us
alone" vs "kill them all" in most cases.
I'm glad to hear that RIRs can respond to users' concerns, but that
doesn't change the fact that they're second-guessing an IETF decision
and that other things in the IPv6 architecture are dependent on that
design decision.
When you've got people in the RIRs talking about "routing around the
failure" in reference to the IETF, that's a pretty clear indication.
Of what? RIR arrogance? No surprise there, every deliberative body
I've been involved with thinks it is superior to others.
IPv6 (as I first understood it) did have a business model assumed -
that one ISP would be all that an enterprise customer would need,
I don't know anybody who assumed that. I think it was instead
assumed that multihomed sites could make do with multiple
(prefixes,addresses) per (net,host) and that applications could
somehow tolerate having multiple source and destination
addresses, be able to pick a reasonable pair from among those
available, and fail over to another source or destination address
when one end or another renumbered or the connection
failed. (All of which I find rather dubious, but it's not the same
thing as assuming that there would be one ISP for an enterprise.)
The operational community heard that message, deemed it not a viable
solution, and responded by passing PIv6. Heck, people think NAT (and
we all know the IETF's head-in-the-sand attitude on that part of
reality) with ULAs is more viable than multiple parallel PA assignments.
Which head in the sand is that? The one that thinks that NATs are
benign, or the one that thinks that they cause lots of problems? Both
types exist in IETF. IETF is like Zaphod Beeblebrox with his heads
constantly arguing with one another from under the sand. That's why
IETF took too long to become aware of the inherent problems associated
with NATs and too long to speak out about those problems, and has said
too little about them. It's also why it never has developed a viable
transition path away from NAT and toward native IPv6.
well, I'm disappointed in the amount of disrespect displayed by RIRs.
Perhaps that's true. Or perhaps the RIRs are trying to get the
message across that how they assign addresses is up to their
communities, not the IETF. Frankly, short of the IETF telling IANA to
pull the RIRs' allocations, I don't see what practical authority the
IETF has over address policy. I also fail to see why the IETF thinks
it _should_ have any authority over that or any other operational
matters. In my view, the IETF develops tools and it's up to operators
to determine if/how to use them.
I think you are confusing policy with protocol design or architecture.
Keith
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