Routing wars pending?

  Hi Hank!

  I don't know to what extent you have been following the discussions
  recently within RIPE wrt Registries of Last Resort...
  
  My first answer to the story below would be 
	    "stop the Registry of Last Resort business asap".
  Just to avoid making the mess even bigger...

>ILAN acts as registry of last resort in Israel.  It owns and assigns
>IP addresses in the 192.114-118.0.0 address range.  These 5 blocks
>are owned by ILAN (AS378).  Over the years, many IP addresses have
>been assigned - in the past to individual companies and more lately
>CIDR blocks to local ISPs. ILAN takes a $50 one time fee to register
>the IP address for the requestor.

  Just a matter of terminology, I'm worried by your mixing of the LRL
  function and phrases like "owns and assigns" in the same sentence with
  "owned by ILAN (AS378)". If you were really sending these signals to
  your peers then there is a good chance of mis-understandings.

  With regard to the rest of your message - here is what we do, both as a
  Service Provider Registry and a as backbone provider which has to deal
  with routing:
  
  We strictly refuse requests to assign address space for further
  sub-assignement. Adresses are *directly* assigned to the eventual user.
  If a service provider wants to act as a Local-IR, then the proper way
  of doing it is to get in touch with the RIPE-NCC and establish a
  registry of it's own.
  
  Just to make sure that everybody understands the rules, we explicitely
  point out that the assignement is only valid for the purpose of
  connecting (directly or through an intermediate step) to our backbone.
  We explicitely reserve the right to reclaim the address space if these
  conditions are not (or no longer) met. I know that RLR are slightly
  different, of course.
  
  With regard to routing, the answer is both collaboration by all 
  service providers (which is working rather well, I think) *and*
  filtering based on the route objects in the RIPE database (which
  appears to gain popularity). If somebody tries to play games, and most
  of the backbones would have filters, then there is a good chance that
  the hickup is confined to a small part of the Internet - which
  eventually makes the "highjacked" addresses more or less useless.
  
  And the multiple database issue should be sorted out anyway, because
  the problem of inconsistency *is* there, even without malicious intent
  on any side.
  
  Wilfried.
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  Wilfried Woeber                :  e-mail: Woeber at CC.UniVie.ac.at
  Computer Center - ACOnet       :  
  Vienna University              :  Tel: +43 1 4065822 355
  Universitaetsstrasse 7         :  Fax: +43 1 4065822 170
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