[address-policy-wg] Re: RIPE Access Policy Change Request to allow allocations to critical infrastructure

>I believe that your argumentation holds; "critical infrastructure" is
>something very personal, and "public"...what's public? Isn't google
>a public service, too? Or Yahoo? Or ebay? Or ...

People seem to be confused about the meaning of "critical infrastructure"
so I decided to see what Google has to say. The first thing it comes up
with is an American government organization called the Department for
Homeland Security. On their question and answer page they say this:
http://www.ciao.gov/publicaffairs/qsandas.htm

1.) What is a critical infrastructure?

The USA Patriot Act defines critical infrastructures as those 
"systems and assets, whether physical or virtual, so vital to the 
United States that the incapacity or destruction of such systems 
and assets would have a debilitating impact on security, national 
economic security, national public health or safety, or any 
combination of those matters." 

That's not something very personal. It is something that is
important to a large number of people.

Here's another one: http://www.atis.org/tg2k/_critical_infrastructure.html

critical infrastructure: 1. Elements of a system that are so vital 
that disabling any of them would incapacitate the entire system.

Disabling .de would make the Internet unusable for millions of
people in Germany and would affect millions of German-speaking
people around the world.

When some part of the infrastructure of the Internet is considered
to be critical, the people responsible for it will build it so that
it can never fail. They do this by applying fault tolerance techniques.
Anycasting DNS is a fault tolerance technique. DENIC is asking for
a policy that understands the need for fault tolerance when an
organization is managing part of the Internet's critical infrastructure.

If this policy focuses on the fault tolerance technique then it 
is doing the wrong things. Policies are not about technology. 
RIPE policies are political agreements that balance the needs
of everyone in the RIPE community. This policy needs to focus
on defining which kinds of "critical infrastructure" are important
enough for the whole community to justify special allocations.

>  Es gibt Luegen, verdammte Luegen und RIPE-141(-219)-Netzantraege.

Translated: There are lies, damned lies and RIPE-141 request forms.

--Michael Dillon