Re: [44net] Scope, limited scope, and policies

So, I'm going to continue to harp on the question of what capabilities/services are we attempting to enable?  On that note, I'm going to point out the ARDC ToS which expressly indicates that the entirety of connectivity is outside the scope of what ARDC does. Specifically, section 3, "ARDC DOES NOT provide network services. Specifically, we do NOT provide network connectivity,"... [1]. While that document does cover address assignment agreements, it doesn't talk about the IPIP mesh at all. Is it out of scope?  Is the IPIP tunnel service in scope and a thing that should be covered by the ToS? Secondly, and less critically, that document has an inaccurate assessment of AMPRNet as far as I understand:  from 44.0.0.0 through 44.255.255.255. So, is the IPIP mesh network gateway an actual service from ARDC?  Should it be?  How is it related to address assignment service? I'm putting forward this question because of the following reasoning: The primary resource of interest is the IPv4 address space.  Those that already know how to work with allocations of address on the internet, either personally or by proxy, can and do get allocations of /24 and greater regularly and utilize them.  Anybody who can do this prefers to do this. (I'm willing to be told that I'm wrong here, but I haven't seen that case.).  The substantial problems show up in the form of addresses being used over IPIP or VPN connections, due to bandwidth, latency (to California and back!), and configuration complexity (610 IPIP tunnels last I counted).  What if we give up on that, and just start pushing users to regional operators with local connectivity solutions? What if we spent the time here building the parts for those local connectivity solutions? To some extent, that's already the discussions underway.  Because I think regional operators will be completely happy to just announce address space out of their existing infrastructure.  Seeing the variety of framings regarding protocol and hardware choices leads me to think that there's not much agreement at all about the scale (Hardware vs Software, ISP / Enterprise / SMB / roll-your-own devices) of the solution that's needed.   How those regional operations interconnect, also a regional to regional question.   Is this whole question out of scope for ARDC/AMPRnet? [1] https://www.ampr.org/terms-of-service/ _________________________________________ 44Net mailing list 44Net(a)mailman.ampr.org https://mailman.ampr.org/mailman/listinfo/44net