HONET'09 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on High capacity optical networks and enabling technologies
Critical resource: An institutional economics of the Internet addressing-routing space
Telecommunications Policy
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Major changes to the critical Internet resource landscape, such as the scarcity of IPv4 and the increasing demand for IP addresses due to the growing mobile market, raise the questions, who will manage these Internet number resources and how should they be allocated and managed? These developments affect the function and organization of Regional Internet Registries (RIRs), the responsible actors for these activities. The geo-political underpinnings of these organizations become all the more apparent when existing RIRs are forced to consider how their role within Internet governance may change moving forward. An analysis of the development of RIRs, including a case study of AfriNIC demonstrates this. The authors consider several approaches to addressing the need to manage Internet number resources in the future and hypothesize that the distribution of Internet number resources will become increasingly decentralized.