[ripe-167] Impressions brought from Moscow meeting

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