[ripe-167] Impressions brought from Moscow meeting

Hi,

No comments on this literary work.

Sorry, only one: RosNIIROS has been established by the State Committee
for Higher Education and Russian Research Center "Kurchatov Institute".

Phantom of Relcom Company is still needed ?

Regards,
Alexei Platonov


According to Andrew Stesin:
> 
> Dear Mirjam, dear Daniel, Robert, Mr. Postel, and others,
> 
> as ripe-167 story goes on, I'd like to inform you about
> some new impressions and information we got with regard
> to it.
> 
> Abstract: Ukrainian LIRs in their vaste majority
> would not agree with the Russian approach there
> and vote against the project of a new RIR in Moscow.
> 
> As you already know, a conference of LIR' represantatives
> from Russia took place in Moscow, January 22.  Ukrainian
> representatives were also present (4 delegations from
> major Ukrainian LIRs, me among them).   During the direct
> conversations with "new RIR in Moscow" project initiators
> many aspects became much more clear.  Here my opinions are.
> 
> 1. During the meeting, *nothing* from the argumentation
>    provided in ripe-167 was
>    recognized by community as a sugnificant argument which clarifies
>    the "new RIR" approach.  Document authors didn't even
>    bother defending their former argumentation.  I got an opinion
>    that argumentation given in ripe-167 was written with the only goal
>    to convince RIPE and IANA, it's pretty much irrelevant to
>    the current state of affairs here.
> 
> 2. It seems that the idea of "new RIR in Moscow" has a plain
>    political background, with a scope limited to a single
>    (though big) country -- Russia, or even to a single city -- Moscow.
> 
>    Our Russian collegues are now facing the trend of their goverment
>    trying to establish a certain degree of control over
>    Internet business in Russia.
> 
>    They also recognize that IP address space distribution is one
>    of the most important things to ISP business.  So they decided
>    to extend the scope and sugnificance of RosNIIROS registry as much
>    as possible, probably in order to prevent "some others" (whos?)
>    attempt to monopolise IP space redistribution *in Russia*.
> 
> 3. The very idea of defining a "region" for the projected RIR in terms of
>    politics, not geography (as opposed to the existing practice) -- is not
>    occasional, this is semi-intentional.
> 
>    The abbreviation "CIS" should really be understood as "a sphere of
>    Russian business and political interests".
> 
>    Some details. Ukraine is a large East European country
>    with population of about 50 million
>    comparatively educated and skilled people (as opposed to about
>    150+ million population of Russia).  The whole territory of
>    Ukraine is in European continent.  The estimated size of
>    Internet (and similar) services market here is comparative to Russian.
>    From the other hand, Ukraine got about 3 year delay in social,
>    technological et al. development compared to Russia (partially
>    due to the fact that Russia monopolized many achievements
>    and infrastructure of ex-USSR).  So Russia has it's business
>    and communication structures being developed faster now and
>    the market is more tight so far.
> 
>    Naturally, Russian companies are interested in joining
>    Ukrainian market, where they might become a stronger players.
>    Consider also the fact that Ukrainian ISPs all were the
>    customers of their Russian collegues (note the ex-USSR
>    infrastructure above) some 2-3 years ago, and were
>    getting sugnificant amounts of funds from Ukraine.
> 
>    Being a RIR (esp. in case RIPE will delegate them monopolistic
>    rights at the territory mentioned) will let certain people
>    and organisations to continue getting their "traditional" funds
>    from other countries, as they used to do before.
> 
> 4. Also note that RIRs tend to have a sugnificant influence
>    on the technical policies and "technical fashion" among their
>    customers; also this means access to technical information
>    about them and ability to monitor the development
>    of their networks.  With RIPE (RNA) this is not an issue for us,
>    as RIPE doesn't represent any single (or group) entity
>    who has strong business interests in Ukraine or anyone
>    who is interested in monitoring our development.
> 
>    And with RosNIIROS this *is* an issue potentially.
>    RosNIIROS doesn't represent a voluntary association of
>    any kind, there isn't one even in a single Russia so far.
>    RosNIIROS is a semi-govermental organization, established as a
>    daughter structure of Moscow "Relcom" company; and
>    Relcom venture is wellknown for it's numerous and
>    continued attempts to become a monopolist on Russian
>    Internet services market; and recently lost a sugnificant
>    share in Ukrainian market due to rapid development of Ukrainian
>    communication infrastructure, which allowed us to get
>    a choice of whom to pay for services.
> 
>    A RIR in Russia, which will tend to fall under the influence of
>    Russian goverment and several big semi-monopolistic companies,
>    will be probably able to cope with intra-Russia issues,
>    but will also serve the interests of Russian business
>    and politics; it won't be able to serve the interests of
>    international community.  Baltic countries (Latvia, Lithuania,
>    Estonia) tend to avoid just *any* contact with Russia due
>    to the reasons above; we in Ukraine aren't so radical, but
>    our reaction continues to be strictly negative.
> 
> Being an official representative of LIR UA.GU, I'd like to get
> a confirmation that our registry will be served by RIPE directly
> in the forseeable future.  We'd also like to see an
> official confirmation from RIPE, of the fact that
> any new LIR at Ukrainian territory will *always* be either
> served by RIPE directly or will have a choice between
> direct service contract from RIPE or indirect -- from other
> RIPE office wherever it might be established in future (Moscow,
> Berlin, Istambul, Kiev... who cares?)
> 
> Thanks a lot for your attention.
> 
> Best regards,
> Andrew Stesin
> 
> nic-hdl: ST73-RIPE
> 
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