pro/cons of virtual hosting services

  > Peter Galbavy <peter at demon.net> writes:

  > I would put it even more stongly. RIPE is there to do a jobs, which is
  > being a registry. Please will a RIPE rep. show me where it says that
  > they have legal and/or moral responsibility to dictate how a company
  > does business ?

  > ...

  > Please keep away from trying to develop business models for the 'net. That
  > is the jobs of the companies that pay your wages. You are not there to
  > decide how applications will work today. Feel free to sit on working
  > groups and influence future developments, which will make the 'net a
  > better place, but please do not try to change the way non-RIPE
  > organisations are already working.


Peter,

we are not dictating how you do business and certainly the RIPE NCC is
not developing business models for the net.  We are indeed providing
registration services among other things.  The IPv4 address space is a
very limited resource and consequently address space conservation is
part of the policies we have to implement when acting as a European
Regional Internet Registry.  The global policies are set by IANA and the
local European variations thereof in the RIPE local-IR working group,
i.e.  this forum. 

Implementing conservation policies is the single item which gives the
NCC the most grief and the most work.  But someone has to do this in the
interest of the Internet as a whole and if we would not do it it would
be bad for the industry.  We would very much like to be spared public
abuse of the kind we experience from time to time when we question
practises which are inherently wasteful of address space for little or
no good reason.  Please imagine where Internet routing would be now if
we would have continued to assign /16s (Bs) to anyone with more than 254
hosts on a physical subnet or if noone would have pushed for a registry 
system that is independent and yet responsive to provider needs, 
sustains itself and allows for routing aggregation.

Daniel