Hullo David,
Thanks for the perspective, my comments inline:
On 1/14/09, David Conrad <[email protected]> wrote:
On Jan 13, 2009, at 8:26 AM, Bill Woodcock wrote:
On Tue, 13 Jan 2009, Graham Beneke wrote:
IPv6 Allocations to Non-Profit Networks
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Many community and non-profit networks exist on the African continent
and around the world... Many of these organizations provide the
services free of charge and do not have any kind of revenue stream.
I strongly support this policy.
So, you'd be happy for (say) the Gates Foundation to not pay AfriNIC
while a small two person commercial ISP serving some rural area in the
bush would be subject to full freight?
I certainly wouldn't, and while this isn't the intent of the proposal,
it might certainly be the effect.
Also, in my (perhaps dated) experience, few countries had a useful
definition of "non-profit corporation". This is why, for example,
APNIC is actually a for-profit company, at least according to the
Australian government. If this remains the case, this policy would
appear to disadvantage ISPs in countries without a non-profit legal/
tax status.
I'm curious: what percentage of the total cost of doing business for
ISPs in Africa is the annual AfriNIC fees relative to the cost of
connectivity, staff, rent, electricity, etc.?
small, but this is for community networks, "ISPs" as we usually think of them.
This is the model under which the Internet was initially built...
No it isn't. The model under which the Internet was build (at least
in the context of address registration) was government subsidies.
Before the RIRs existed, the US taxpayers (via the US government) paid
for _all_ address registration services. That time is long past and
we probably don't want to try to revisit it.
Agreed
To be clear, this policy is asking one set of AfriNIC members (for-
profits) to subsidize another set ("non-profits", whatever that
means). Long ago, APNIC looked at the same policy and decided against
it since (a) it was felt yearly APNIC fees were such a tiny proportion
of the total cost of providing Internet service in the AP region that
it was nonsensical to think that waiving those fees would have a
significant impact on the growth of the Internet in the region and (b)
the APNIC executive council had mechanisms by which fees could be
waived. Whether or not these considerations are relevant for the
African region at this point in time is obviously something you all
will need to determine.
This seems to be a corner case, and while I am all for getting IPv6
into the hands of community networks and their ilk, I wonder if this
can't be done via tunnel brokers making /48 assignments
or by other means. In general, I think it is not helpful to write many
corner cases into policy.
Like Badru, I am on the fence on this one, but currently leaning on
the "no" side.
