I agree in principle with Joe, APNIC are pretty easy to deal with, and for any reasonable robuts requirer of numbers, the costs are hardly prohibitive at US$2,000 one-off, plus US$1,250 per annum. But I guess the argument is that some people have a class C or 2 that they pay nothing for currently and would like to continue to pay nothing. As I said in my previous email, InternetNZ would be happy to step up to the plate if there really is a need - but I doubt we'd be in the business of supplying free number blocks. Keith Davidson Joe Abley stated:
As far as I can see, it's APNIC's job, and they're doing it pretty well already.
There seem to be a lot of people assuming that APNIC are hard to deal with (or that the policies are unreasonable) without ever having tried to deal with them, or to find out what the policies actually are.
The economics are pretty simple for ISPs and largish multi-homed companies: you can pay the cost of renumbering every time you change provider, or you can pay the membership fees at APNIC and obtain provider-independent resources. Choose the option that suits your budget.
Regardless of how much someone might think that every two-person company deserves provider-independent address space, the unfortunate reality is that this doesn't scale (and the problem is the routing system, not address space scarcity).
Joe