On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 8:54 PM, Owen DeLong <[email protected]> wrote: > On Jul 17, 2013, at 5:00 PM, William Herrin <[email protected]> wrote: >> On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 5:18 PM, Owen DeLong <[email protected]> wrote: >>> On Jul 17, 2013, at 4:34 PM, William Herrin <[email protected]> wrote: >>>> What about Comcast? They're in the business of providing cable >>>> television service. They'll also provide you with Internet access on >>>> the same coax cable with the modem they rent you. >>>> >>>> ISP or end-user? >>> >>> The service is intended to be used to connect customer-owned >>> equipment to the internet. As such, they are clearly in the LIR/ISP realm. >> >> Starbucks, Hilton, they have large sections of the operation dedicated >> to connecting customer-owned equipment to the Internet. > > Permit me to rephrase… The service (in the case of Comcast) is > intended to connect customer-owned networking equipment to the > internet (e.g. routers, bridges, etc.). In the case of Starbucks, > Hilton, etc., the expectation is that you are connecting a terminal > host and not a packet forwarding device.
Huh? Comcast is an ISP because they give you a modem to connect between the coax and your ethernet port but Starbucks isn't because you connect to a wifi access point instead? > I think getting into this level of semantic detail is a clear case of > reductio ad absurdum. I'll say it is! The point here is that 21st century networks don't look like the dialup+webhost ISP of 1997, nor do they look like the "our employees have Netscape and Eudora" end-user of 1997. Attempts to shoehorn 21st century networks into those obsolete definitions frankly come up looking pretty stupid. What we *do* see is organizations managing IP addresses in several ways: 1. assigned to organization-owned infrastructure under the control of the organization's employees 2. assigned long-term to exclusive use by the organization's customers or users 3. ephemerally assigned to exclusive use by the organization's customers or users 4. reserved for future use And we see that most organizations do a mix of all of these things, not one or the other. Regards, Bill Herrin -- William D. Herrin ................ [email protected] [email protected] 3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/> Falls Church, VA 22042-3004 _______________________________________________ PPML You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the ARIN Public Policy Mailing List ([email protected]). Unsubscribe or manage your mailing list subscription at: http://lists.arin.net/mailman/listinfo/arin-ppml Please contact [email protected] if you experience any issues.
