Emergence of the RIRs
Internationalization
While the engineering-driven need for topological address space assignment was becoming clear, there was also an emerging recognition that the administrative mechanisms of address space distribution needed further development. A central system just would not scale for a number of reasons, including:
- Sheer volume
- Distance from the address space consumers
- Lack of an appropriate global funding structure
- Lack of local community support
The need to change administrative procedures was formally recognized by August 1990, when the Internet Activities Board published a message it had sent to the US Federal Networking Council stating it is timely to consider further delegation of assignment and registration authority on an international basis (RFC 1174).
The increasing cultural diversity of the Internet also posed administrative challenges for the central IR. In October 1992, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) published RFC 1366, which described the growth of the Internet and its increasing globalization and set out the basis for an evolution of the registry process, based on a regionally distributed registry model. This document stressed the need for a single registry to exist in each geographical region of the world (which would be of continental dimensions). Registries would be unbiased and widely recognized by network providers and subscribers within their region. Each registry would be charged with allocating remaining address space in a manner compatible with potential address aggregation techniques (or CIDR)