Is the Internet Shutting Out Independent Players?

ikekrull asks: "After looking to see how I could set up my company's LAN to be multi-homed ^? , I found that it would be next-to-impossible for me to do this. 'Providerless' IP addresses are no longer allocated to anybody in this part of the world (New Zealand) by APNIC ^? , unless you meet requirements (financial and political) that are pretty much unmeetable by anyone but a large ISP. Does this put control of the entire internet further and further into the hands of large corporate players, and and is anyone particularly interested in changing this situation?"

"ISPs aren't advertizing routes for competing ISPs, and since IP blocks are heavily filtered upstream, this won't do much good anyway. The reasons for this are clear (Routing table growth was getting way out of hand), hence the introduction of CIDR ^? , and the allocation of IPs to ISPs, with a resulting lockout on availability of routable IP space to individuals or smaller groups.

With the availabilty of IPv6, and the cost of RAM, I find it somewhat hard to believe that either IP address blocks are scarce, or that the size of routing tables are unmanageable any more. This might have been true with an 8MB Cisco 10 years ago, but surely it would be a negligible cost to put 1-2GB of RAM on even a reasonably budget router at todays prices.

Obviously, IPV6 isn't really here yet, but i would like to think that when (if) it arrives, we will see a more open routing system.

Is anybody working on returning some kind of equal standing to 'the little guys' when it comes to internet routing infrastructure, and how a more 'open' system could work in practice on tomorrow's (or today's) internet?"

Comments

uhm...

[Anonymous Coward]

The person that wrote this has 0 clue of what's involed with routing. He needs to go read books before submitting stuff like this.

"just add a gig or two of ram to a cisco router"
hahahaha

Also, IPv4 is running out of IP's. Plain and simple. Therefore, these IP's need to be given to people that have a clue what to do with them and not piss them away. I work for a major webhosting company and we have to fight for our ips everytime we need more. It's getting harder and harder for us. Luckily we own our entire Class B now, but I know soon a time will come when we dont... heh

Research before whining to /.

Re:Time to get rid of jon katz

[recursiv]

Insightful? This story has absolutely nothing to do with Jon Katz.