Policy Statement on Address Space Allocations
Sean Doran smd at cesium.clock.org
Sat Jan 27 22:34:08 CET 1996
This is a very interesting question involving economics of the Internet, which are still very fuzzy. I think it would make an interesting experiment. Certainly there has been lots of talk about putting something big like wuarchive.wustl.edu or ftp.uu.net into something obscure to see what breaks. There are existence proofs of sorts that popular sites can have an effect: ftp.uu.net's insistence on IN-ADDR.ARPA mappings is the one that pops into my mind immediately. Some experiments, like exp39, involved moving root nameservers into a subnet of 39/8. However, nobody has yet said, "I am Playbeing, I have content people want to get to, I can leak a /32 if I want to, and everyone will have to carry it or explain to their users why they can't get their sex-on-demand". Perhaps that's because people are afraid that there is so much other interesting content out there that disconnectivity of any sort from their customer-base would be fatal, in that users would find alternatives fairly quickly. "Click here." <click> (time passes) "Error." This happens so frequently and for so many reasons that friends of mine who are somewhat more typical dialup users would simply ignore the link or site and move on to something else.[*] There certainly is alot of competition on the content front these days. Can a big web site afford to have people thinking, "stoopid Netscape, their server is down"? Or would they be crafty and say, "all our information has now moved to _a new site_; if you get a time-out error then you should _send email to your Internet Service Provider_ telling them so"? Interesting stuff. Sean. [*] I'm different. I want to know why it doesn't work. I gather that doing traceroutes and looking at routers is atypical behaviour.
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