neutrality and nat

> an important part of the rirs' job is information/education.  trying
> to pretend that nats don't exist is not realistic.  trying to explain
> the trade-off would be useful.  the hard part would be doing so usefully
> without getting into a document mire.

I disagree. The RIRs jobs (certainly in the case of RIPE) should be the
(fair) management of those resources they are responsible for - IPs and ASes
etc.

Information / Education should be functions iff they do not impact on the
primary function and are acheived at close to zero cost - i.e. self funding.

Vendors selling solutions that use NAT (ISPs, router vendors, free software
projects, consultacies) should be esposing NAT if they feel they can sell it
and support it. Not RIPE. NAT is *not* a general method for conserving IPv4
address space - it is a very specific and limited method as we all know -
and is very very useful in many cases.

Peter