Policy Statement on Address Space Allocations

Andrew,

> Ah - we may have something that works - we have someone (the
> consortium) being paid (by these companies) to provide (or further
> purchase) transit.
> 
> However I'm not sure how this works of one (or more) of these companies
> decides to buy or provide transit on their own (outside of the
> consortium).
> 
> Lets pick a company (call it X) that decides to do this.  Now X's
> routes have to be known outside of the consortium's aggregate (since X
> is providing its own global transit and since X does not want to give
> free transit to the entire aggregate).
> 
> Humm - this does not seem to scale.

Members should be able to get additional connectivity, beyond what
will be provided by the consortium, but this connecitivy would
be provided via "route pull", and thus could have limited
propagation scope. This connectivity would be just to get better
routes. Global connectivity  would be provided by "pushing" the 
route that covers all the destinations within the consortium.

> I suppose that if you find a set of companies that are all willing to
> be part of the consortium & just part of the consortium, then you could
> do addressing for this consortium as a whole.  Hey!  I think that we
> just invented provider (consortium) based addressing again.

Yep, one should realise that a NAP is nothing but a provider.  The NAP
run by a consortium is nothing but a provider that is operated by the
consortium.

With consortiums a little ISP could have a choice - pick a consortium
and get its addresses out of consortium's block, or pick a "big
provider's" and get its addresses out of the provider's block.  Observe
though, that changing contractual relations (with the consortium or the
provider) would require renumbering of all the ISP's clients.

Among some issues to consider are:

(a) how competition among the members of the consortium would
    impact the cooperation needed to preserve the consortium

(b) would an "inter-consortium" carrier be allowed to join
    the consortium(s) it serves and compete against other
    (local) ISPs

Yakov.