Scope, limited scope, and policies - 44net

4 Jan 2021

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: 
...
  “AMPRNet” means the network 44/8; that is, all
Internet IP addresses
 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/