On 1/27/13 11:45 AM, Thomas Lowenhaupt wrote:
Looking at this question from the narrow perspective of New York City, are you saying that IP4/6 address allocation to entities that might seek to compete with the existing bandwidth oligopoly is dependent on an address-freeing action from the ICANN? And thus the relevance to the NA-Discuss list, to answer Joly's question, is that if we're interested in improving bandwidth in New York, the list should bottom-up an enabling request to the ICANN board of directors?
Let us assume for the moment that address associated with prefixes announced to the Default Free Zone (DFZ), and provisioned at link level such that the associated bandwidth is greater than 56kB are provided by a "market" dominated by a single ip/cdn (internet protocol over cable data network) operator holding a municipal franchise granting exclusive access to public rights of way (utility poles and tunnels), and by a former Bell Operating Company offering ip/ss7 (internet protocol over Signalling System 7), which provides "competitive local exchange" facilities to third-party ip/ss7 providers, and by one or two ip/vsat (internet protocol over Very Small Aperture Terminal) providers. I think this is a reasonable assumption for most of the major metro areas in the NARALO region. There are a few exceptions, one is the subject of the note which began this tread. You've asked if re-allocation, presumably of IPv4 address resources, is necessary, or at least a cost element, for reducing what we can refer to as a bandwidth oligopoly. In theory, if the allocation regime during the current exhaustion of IPv4 allocators (ARIN in the NARALO region) is "market price", then any high capital venture, say putting addresses on refrigerators or billboards, could price human eyeballs (access network operators) out of the market. So the answer to the oligopoly and transition question you've posed is a very, very thin "yes", however that doesn't necessarily mean that an advise-the-Board public interest issue exists, or exists as narrowly as address block assignment. The more general question is should the Board be advised that access policy controlled by market price is contrary to the public interest. There are "free market" advocates on the ARIN AC, and there is no shortage of "free market" advocates for access to each of the unique endpoint identifier resources for which the Corporation is the current coordinator. Clearly, I think the Board should be so advised, though not from the hypothetical you've raised, but were I to offer my thoughts on the public interest capabilities of a public metropolitan network operator, as I did when writing one vendor's response to a major metropolitan government's gTLD RFP, the interdependency of naming and addressing policy would address and link address and link provisioning and names policies (puns intended). Eric