[ripe-167] Impressions brought from Moscow meeting

Dear All,

 Having lurked into this long and IMHO very indecisive discussing, please
bear with someone that is on the geographical opposite side of the E in
RIPE (Portugal).

I tend to agree that the main justification, both in RIPE167 and the
discussion in this list, for creating a new RIR, is based on the following
main points:

a) There are language problems communicating with the existing RIR (RIPE);
b) There are time zone differences that make communication difficult;
c) There are currency/payment difficulties for local ISPs;
d) There are travel difficulties to attend RIPE meetings;

Since we live in a country where:
 1. There are a lot less English teachers per capita than in the considered
region for the new RIR;
 2. TZ difference has never been an issue communicating over the Internet
even when we had to resort to IANA in California (8 hour TZ difference) a
long time ago, and still today for other issues;
 3. Burocracy and high bank services costs are high;
 4. Travelling to central Europe is both very expensive and time inefficient;
 5. Nevertheless, we consider to be much better off, in regard to all these
issues, than many other countries also served by RIPE, in other large
geographical areas and continents (Africa is paradigmatic).

 I tend to believe that there is no solid justification for a 1st tier RIR
for the aforementioned region:

 1. If a prospective RIR client, which from now on I'll generalize as being
a LIR-ISP, in that  geographical area has a problem with the Internet
"lingua franca", English, needed for a relatively easy and well
"procedured" dialog with the RIR, then we believe that this ISP is better
off not being a LIR-ISP, and get their "IR service" from their upstream
transit provider.
Unrelated to this issue, I'm inclined to propose that it should be a
MANDATORY requirement for any LIR-ISP to have 24 hour English speaking
staff available, since in addition to IR issues, there are still so many
operational issues that can affect everyone, that having "language
problems" can be a potential nightmare when some English-impaired ISP
starts BGP announcing your address space over some major backbone, or any
similarly disrupting and urgent to resolve issues.

 2. TZ difference is a non-issue IMHO. If it is such an important problem
maybe the eastern/Asia part of Russia and other FSU countries should get
their service from APNIC. And arguments like "we provide service from
Moscow to Vladivostok" sound bogus, since I tend to believe that a large
ISP that spans Europe and Asia will not have two or more internal
departments dealing with "IR" issues. It will have one, and I guess that if
it's based in western Russia it will prefer RIPE and if it's based in
Eastern Siberia it will prefer APNIC (but if they have two, perhaps they
should concentrate their efforts combining those depts, instead of trying
to creating one RIR for each department, or turning one the departments
into a RIR...)
(As a side note, we may have to assign IP addresses to clients in Macao,
that is 10 TZ away from Lisbon, or Timor (12 hours) for that matter :-))

 3. Payment difficulties seems like another somewhat bogus, if
understandable issue. I believe that today there are very few countries
where it is really difficult to make foreign currency payments. And IMHO,
the countries in the FSU are not worse of, on the contrary, than most
African and a least one big island in the Caribbean. Of course, small
"Mom-and-Po shops" will have more difficulty to get this handled, but they
will also have a lot more difficulty dealing with tons of other issues than
larger companies. So it's a fact of life, and unless one wants a RIR for
every "currency zone" in the world, we should all be able to live with it.
If there are countries where, because of the local political regime, there
is no way to make the RIPE payment, I'm sure the RIPE community will find a
imaginative way of getting them service.

 4. Travel difficulties are yet another very weak argument in the context
of the RIR and Internet in general. The number and the necessity to attend
meetings physically is IMHO quite low.
a) we have alternative ways of communicating our points of view, sometimes
in a  more focused way through email, than in live meetings (this email, is
of course a notable exception); b) we can raise issues that are relevant to
a number of LIRs and have one representative flown in for a live meeting.
 I'm afraid that again this is a fact of life: dutch ISPs will always have
an advantage in this regard while the RIPE-NCC is based in Amsterdam. In
fact Amsterdam ISPs are better off than "some little town in the north of
Holland" ISPs.
 In addition I'm afraid that RIPE-NCC and its coordinator(s) have created a
trust relationship with LIR's that makes LIRs very comfortable with the way
things are handled.

All in all I believe that with such a weak justification, creating a
precedent would make room for a lot more RIR's: the Iberian RIR, The
British Isles RIR, the Scandinavian RIR, The Basque RIR, the Atlantic
Islands RIR, the Magreb RIR, the Central African RIR, the Southern African
RIR, etc.

(To make this even clearer, if RIPN is created, I believe that we will
contact our spanish friends and propose an Iberian RIR to be based in
Lisbon, because the weather here much better than in Amsterdam, and that is
defintely a better justification than any of the aforementioned ones:).

Of course, whether we should have competing RIRs for the same region is
quite a different issue. However for the time being the "de-facto" monopoly
for IR services is well supported by all LIRs I guess, mainly because the
quality of RIPE-NCC services probably is still a model for most LIR-ISP
even those in competitive environments :-).

Just my long 2 cEU
---
pedro ramalho carlos  Pedro.Carlos at co.ip.pt      IP SA
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