Subject: Re: Tired of Waiting

From: [email-masked] (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Tue, 14 Jul 98 11:45:03 -0400

From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>

    > If you don't see why for-profit, but competing, Registries don't work,
    > ask yourself how you'd feel once your snappy URL
    > http://my_name.new_tld/foo/bar is embedded in 10,000 web pages
    > world-wide, and your for-profit Registry then ups the rate to $1,000
    > per month....)

    Explain to me what we don't have the same problem with Visa and
    Mastercard? They are both essentially shared registries composed of
    competing for-profit registrars.

I suppose your point is that having (competing) for-profit registries has not
proven to be subject to difficulties with "lock-in" in this case?

There are some key differences, though - the most important of which is that
I don't have my Visa number embedded permanently in databases at 10,000 other
organizations - as a URL embodying my DNS name might be. So there's no major
leverage either registry can use to their advantage. If Visa raised their
rates to $100 per month per number, everyone would just get Mastercards.

Anyway, try moving from one Visa "registrar" (aka "bank") to another, and
keeping your same Visa number - so that system is not really a perfect
analogue to what we're trying to do here.

	Noel

PS: Didn't we just have the US Congress mandate "number portability" for
local phone companies to prevent just this kind of "lock-in" - and for much
the same reason, which is that it's much harder to change your phone number
than your credit card number.

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From: Milton Mueller <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Jul 1998 17:58:01 -0400

A key fact about number portability in telephone markets is that it does NOT
prevent new businesses or entrepreneurs from starting systems with proprietary
numbering or labelling systems that are *not* portable. The problem with those
who are willing to suddenly (and in utter historical naivete) declare the name
space a "public trust" is that they seem to want to exclude all other
alternatives.

I like the idea of domain name portability. As a consumer, I would be more likely
to choose a registrar who operates in such a TLD space. But there is no reason to
set up the system in such a way as to *prevent* alternative, proprietary,
competing TLDs from emerging, as long as a choice of a shared system is
available.

Any standardization characterized by network externalities exhibits
characteristics of so-called "lock-in." This is true of hundreds of products and
services offered on the market--everything from cellular telephones to automobile
parts. It seems a few computer geeks have discovered an economic concept for the
first time and are going overboard with it. As they say, a little bit of
knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Have we forgotten the drawbacks of "public trusts?" The radio spectrum was
administered as a public trust for decades, and the resulting administration was
notoriously inefficient economically, and prone to stifling product and service
innovation.

In computer equipment and software markets, there is a healthy mix of open and
proprietary standards. Lock in exists on a continuum. Let's get real about this
subject.

Milton Mueller

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From: Patrick Greenwell <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Jul 1998 21:31:52 -0700 (PDT)

> than your credit card number.

Please, when customers are guaranteed IP portability, let me know....

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From: "Roeland M.J. Meyer" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 08:46:05 -0700

>Please, when customers are guaranteed IP portability, let me know....

If you have an ASN then you can be portable, within limits of BGP4.
___________________________________________________ 
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e-mail: <mailto:[email-masked]>[email-masked]
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Company web-site: <http://www.mhsc.com/>www.mhsc.com/
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From: "Perry E. Metzger" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 12:07:55 -0400

> Please, when customers are guaranteed IP portability, let me know....

Phone numbers aren't like IP addresses. IP addresses are much more
like routing information -- the stuff that is permanent in the IP
world is the domain name, not the IP address.

Perry

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From: Patrick Greenwell <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 09:12:29 -0700 (PDT)

> world is the domain name, not the IP address.

Phone numbers aren't like routing information? Then why do we have area
codes and exchange prefixes?

Further, I would love to have a truly permanent, portable IP address(es). 
I imagine lots of folks would.

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From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 17:32:12 +0000

>I imagine lots of folks would. 

Right.  Lots of people would.  The problem is that at present, it's
simply not technically feasible.  Portable IP addresses -- even on a
corporate scale, where the units routed are networks, not hosts -- would
imply a very large increase in the size of the global routing table.
And that's problematic, partly because of the memory requirements -- routers
don't use the SIMMs you buy at your corner computer store -- but because
of the computational complexity of the routing table calculations.  And
that issue, in turn, is exacerbated by the desire for the Internet to
respond quickly to changes in topology, which in turn means that the
calculations need to be done rather frequently.

It may be that new algorithms and techniques will make this point moot.
For now, the best approach is to adopt technologies that make addresses
less visible and less permanent, such as IPv6 with automatic renumbering.
Or perhaps IPv6's large address space will let us experiment with other
techniques, such as geographical addressing and metropolitan area
exchanges.  For now, though, I think we have to live with topology-based
addressing -- not because anyone wants to, but because the technology
doesn't exist to do otherwise.

I should note that this issue, unlike most of the others, is almost
purely technical.  If anyone has any *detailed, technical* refutations
-- and not simply assertions that topology-based addresses are wrong,
or a bare claim that the problem is solved -- I'd be interested in
hearing it.  You're right, of course, that today it is an important
issue.  But I for one don't know how to solve it, nor to my knowledge
do the IETFers I respect.

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From: Patrick Greenwell <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 11:17:28 -0700 (PDT)

> imply a very large increase in the size of the global routing table.

That really depends on what you consider a network. /30? /29? /24?
Certainly Sprint could remove their (now) assinine filter tomorrow, and I
don't think you would see a very large increase in the size of the global
routing table. Most providers announce /24's already anyways. 

At any rate, I wasn't saying that personalized, individual IP portability
is technically feasible at this time, just that it would be nice.
Perhaps we could ask the telco industry, who is working on what seems
to me to be a fairly similar issue with phone number portability. :-)

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From: John Day <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 14:54:51 -0400

>>I imagine lots of folks would.

But it wouldn't be an address.

Noel, you want to explain this or is it worth it?

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From: Patrick Greenwell <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 12:20:25 -0700 (PDT)

> Noel, you want to explain this or is it worth it?

Oh, please do. :-)

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From: Simon Spero <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Jul 1998 22:40:47 -0400 (EDT)

> Noel, you want to explain this or is it worth it?
[Noel Chiappa had a farm EIEID...] 

If no-one has any objection, I will setup a daemon to automically post
random postings from the big-internet archive until we all travel
sufficiently far back in time that we can prevent the spice girls from
meeting.

ObLibel: Postel didn't write 793 - bacon did