In the IETF, you need rough consensus to make decisions. I'm not
entirely sure how this works in all the RIRs, but I think at least
for ARIN, there is some form of voting involved.
ARIN also has a consensus call/declaration. Voting (at meetings) is
recorded for the record and for data. Mailing list input is also
considered as part of the weighing of community input. The ARIN
Advisory Committee (AC) makes the call as whether there is sufficient
support for a proposal to go forward. Details of the overall process
can be found at http://www.arin.net/policy/irpep.html
There are five RIRs, but the decisions they make often have global
impact, and once one RIR has taken a course of action, the others
often feel the need to follow.
Correct.
Case in point is provider independent address space for IPv6. For a
decade, this wasn't possible because the IETF was first studying, and
after a _lot_ of effort to get things rolling, working on, mechanisms
to provide multihoming benefits without injecting a prefix into the
global routing table for each multihomed site. Then, with something
workable within reach but not quite finished, ARIN saw fit to allow
PI for IPv6 anyway, with potentially very harmful long-term results.
This is one view of what happened. My take is not so simplistic.
The IETF leadership never saw fit to say something about this during
the ARIN process, and the ARIN process mostly consisted of "I'm not
worried about the future and I want my PI block". The RIR policy
mechanisms are simply not capable of rejecting policy changes that
benefit a subset of the community, especially any subset that is well-
versed in RIR matters, if such a change is against the interest of
the community at large.
This is FUD, pure and simple. There was overwhelming support for the
PI to end sites proposal. Anyone who was at the ARIN meeting would
have to take away two things: 1) some people were seriously worried
about the long-term impact the policy would have on routing table
size, and 2) there was still an overwhelming sense that PI for end
sites was needed anyway, to support the requirements of larger
enterprises. There were even some people who shared _both_ views.
The IETF isn't immune to this, but does a lot better than the RIRs
because it has a technically capable leadership rather than an
administratively capable leadership. (Maybe that also explains the
differences in the financial situation between the RIRs and the
IETF...)
I find your characterization of the ARIN AC as only "adminstratively
capable" to be inaccurate and unhelpful.
Thomas
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