I have been trying to access that plenary session from the UN website for the past couple of hours with no luck, however, every other plenary session appears to be available. Anyone else having trouble with that link?

In order to meet the claimed goal of improving IP address and routing information aggregation IP address registries should be created in conformity with the overall clusters of internet connectivity.  In other words RIR boundaries should roughly match areas of rich connectivity with boundaries drawn between those areas.  That is not necessarily the same as geographic regions.

Geographic regions as a basis for IP address registries is merely a political sop to gain regional political support.

My last conversation with Jon Postel was on exactly this point - that IP address registries should conform to IP address aggregation and not political correctness and that such registries should come into existence or be merged as the lumps of connectivity of the net evolve.  We were in general agreement.

The ITU has a good record of handling telephony identifiers; there is no reason to believe that institutionally they would be any better or any worse than any other RIR except for their penchant to recognize countries and large, paying, corporations as having a voice in ITU decisions while leaving mere biological people and small companies on the outside.  The RIRs, particularly ARIN, have set a good standard of openness to which any new RIR ought to aspire.

There isn’t any particular need for a new RIR, whether that be the ITU or not.  In fact there is some merit to the idea that we have too many RIRs already.

But if there were a need for a new RIR, the ITU, but only if it opens it doors wider and can avoid the kind of brutal country-going-rogue that we saw this week at the IGF meeting when presented with a negative message on a sign about a book, would not necessarily be objectionable.

It may be somewhat illuminating to remember that the IPv6 address space began life, back in the early 1990’s, with one half of the entire space, a carved out to Netware/IPX networks.

If there was once a reason to give half of the IPv6 space to essentially one company then some descendent of that idea, even if withered and faint, might remain viable to justify some IPv6 space to the ITU to use as its sandbox for allocations, particularly if we recognize that gifts of RIR-ness to gain political support has been around for a decade.

Karl -

Like Jon, I agreed that the regional registry boundaries would ideally match regions across which aggregation could be used to the benefit of the routing table.  The challenge which such an approach is that individual ISP’s wish to control their network routing across their backbones, and do not want to have a single aggregate which represents multiple network in a single region/country.

The reason we have regionalization in the registry system is to provide for more relevant policy making and support, as different regions of the globe have different circumstances in terms of language and economic conditions.  This approached has worked very well, with the RIR’s working together to help with LACNIC and AfriNic formation when they were appropriate.  I’d recommend having discussions with folks in those regions about whether they feel better served as a result.

It is true that each additional Internet Registry causes multinational service providers to have to deal with an additional administrative overhead, and means that have to manage additional IP blocks and the resulting routing thereof.  In fact, an additional registry actually results in more routes over the same period for the same amount of customers, as large providers have to drawn their space in smaller blocks across more registries.  For this reason, the addition of any Internet registries needs to be very carefully considered, and presently these tradeoffs are reflected in the ICANN/NRO ICP-2 global policy on recognition of regional Internet registries.

/John