Summary
- The first regionalisation documents treated geography as an answer to scale, language, local service and route aggregation. They did not establish five natural or sovereign Internet territories.
- ICP-2 converted a proposed coverage area into a recognised service responsibility through institutional criteria, broad support and a transition plan, not through ratification by states or every affected holder.
- The 2002 ARIN–LACNIC transition shows how a border became operational: requests changed destination, dual agreements appeared, invoices moved, reverse-DNS authority changed hands, and current and archived records were transferred under an audit trail.
- AFRINIC’s 2005 recognition changed APNIC’s region by moving six Indian Ocean territories. The episode proves that the map can be redrawn through institutional coordination while leaving unresolved how individual holders were notified or represented.
- Current ISO-coded lists make the borders easy to administer, but they should be described as service maps. Their force is practical and contractual, not evidence of exclusive political jurisdiction over networks, operators or states.
A border that no parliament drew
Open almost any account-application page in the number-registry system and geography appears before law. An applicant is expected to know which Regional Internet Registry serves its country or economy. The answer determines which portal receives the request, which staff evaluate it, which agreement is offered, which fee schedule applies, which database carries the record and which procedures frame later changes. To the applicant, the border can feel as firm as a public jurisdiction.
Yet the five-region map was not made by a multilateral treaty. States did not exchange instruments of ratification defining the boundaries of ARIN, RIPE NCC, APNIC, LACNIC and AFRINIC. There is no global statute assigning every country and territory to one registry and creating a court for border disputes. The map emerged from technical-administrative distribution, recognition decisions, negotiated transitions and repeated operational practice.
That origin does not make the map imaginary. Administrative arrangements can become extraordinarily durable when every surrounding process relies on them. If applications are referred to one registry, contracts are signed there, fees are paid there, reverse zones are administered there and historical records are kept there, the service border has consequences. The error is to infer a political jurisdiction from those consequences. An arrangement can be operationally exclusive without becoming sovereign.
The distinction matters because “region” does two different jobs in registry discourse. It identifies a service area, which is useful. It can also be made to sound like a represented political community, which is much harder to prove. The first claim can be tested against country lists, transition plans and request flows. The second requires an authorisation theory that the historical documents do not supply.
The best way to understand the map is therefore not to stare at its colours. It is to reconstruct what happened when the colours changed. Two transitions are especially revealing. LACNIC displaced ARIN’s predecessor coverage in Latin America and parts of the Caribbean in 2002. AFRINIC later displaced coverage previously supplied by APNIC, ARIN and RIPE NCC, including six territories transferred from APNIC in 2005. Those changes expose the machinery behind the border.
Regionalisation began as a scaling design
The early documentary record describes a distributed registration function, not a division of the Internet into political domains. RFC 1466, published in May 1993, began from growth and globalisation. Demand for network numbers had increased, and distribution was described as desirable because registries in distinct geographic areas could better serve local communities in language and local custom.
Its map was provisional. The document identified Europe, North America, Central and South America, and the Pacific Rim as areas where delegated registration should be considered. Where no organisation had yet been identified, the central Internet Registry would remain the default. It also contemplated future candidate registries as other regions became more active. This was a staged administrative design, not the discovery of timeless continental boundaries.
The document’s technical context is equally important. It proposed broad geographic allocation of then-classful address blocks partly in a scheme compatible with address aggregation. It reserved ranges for “Others” and treated earlier assignments as “Multi-regional.” These labels are the language of engineering flexibility. They are difficult to reconcile with a theory that each region possessed an inherent entitlement to the addresses associated with it.
RFC 1466 did seek one regional registry per geographic area at that level. It also said a regional registry should be unbiased, broadly recognised by providers and subscribers, adequately resourced and coordinated with the central registry. Those criteria explain why a service provider could become the normal entry point for a region. They do not convert the provider into a legislature or establish that every network subscriber delegated political authority to it.
The document even preserved a direct safety valve: applicants could contact the central registry, which would normally refer them but remained prepared to serve them if necessary. That detail has faded from later institutional memory. It shows that early exclusivity was pragmatic rather than metaphysical. Distribution improved service and scale; it was not presented as a natural right of one corporation to all applicants inside a coloured area.
The origin story therefore contains both the strength and the limit of the regional model. Local service, language, time zone, operational knowledge and route aggregation are real advantages. But a service advantage is not a territorial title. The map began as an answer to administrative load and network growth. Any broader jurisdictional claim has to find another source.
ICP-2 turned proposals into recognised service areas
By 2001, the Internet needed a more formal test for establishing new Regional Internet Registries. ICP-2, adopted on 4 June 2001, supplied that test. It required a proposed region large enough to support a new registry, a stable legal and operational structure, broad support among Local Internet Registries in the proposed region, technical capability, neutrality, financial sustainability and a transition plan.
The criteria are consequential because recognition changes how peer institutions behave. A recognised registry can receive address space, participate in coordination, accept direct requests and become the institution whose records other registries and operators expect to consult. Recognition can therefore make a proposed border effective even without public-law jurisdiction.
But the form of the act matters. ICP-2 is an institutional recognition policy. Its tests ask whether a candidate can perform a service and whether the relevant operator community broadly supports it. They do not require a treaty conference, legislative approval in each affected country or individual consent from every resource holder whose administrative relationship may change.
“Broad support” is valuable evidence, but it is not self-defining. Which LIRs were counted? How were non-members, end users, governments, legacy holders and absent operators treated? Was support measured country by country, by organisation, by meeting attendance or through letters? How were dissent and silence distinguished? ICP-2 does not turn those questions into a detailed franchise.
The transition-plan requirement is more concrete. It recognises that a region is not established by declaration alone. Service responsibility must be moved without duplicate records, broken reverse delegation, lost files or uncertain billing. This requirement points directly to the real source of enforceability: coordinated operational change.
Recognition is thus a switch in an institutional network. It tells the other registries and the central coordination layer to treat the candidate as responsible for a defined service area. Once requests and records follow that signal, the border becomes difficult for an applicant to ignore. The switch is real. Its legal character remains private coordination among institutions, not a grant of sovereign territory.
The LACNIC border was implemented as a project plan
The ARIN–LACNIC transition plan dated 25 June 2002 is unusually revealing because it does not rely on constitutional vocabulary. It lists work. The plan anticipated final recognition in late October or early November and full independent operation on 18 November 2002. Between those dates lay the tasks that made the new region function.
Registration moved first through an intermediate phase. Applicants began using LACNIC templates and submitting requests directly to LACNIC. LACNIC evaluated them and made an allocation determination, while ARIN initially supplied a second opinion before LACNIC completed the action. The planned end of that second-opinion step on 18 November marked a practical shift from supervised emergence to independent operation.
This sequence shows why an institutional border is not merely a line. It is a routing rule for human decisions. Before the change, a request from the emerging region entered ARIN’s process. During transition, it entered LACNIC’s process but still touched ARIN. After cutover, LACNIC became the decision and service point. The applicant did not need to accept a political theory for the border to affect it. The request sequence delivered the effect.
Reverse DNS was transferred in stages too. LACNIC servers were identified, configured as secondary and then made primary for relevant zones. The plan distinguished technical operation from administrative authority and proposed signed transfer letters identifying zones and serial numbers. That is a chain-of-custody method, not an annex to a territorial treaty.
Record migration went beyond current database entries. The plan covered current and archived registration records, current and archived accounting records, electronic files, checksums and paper copies. Transfer and receipt letters would document custody. Electronic files would be identified by name and system time, with checksum material supporting integrity. ARIN would retain originals of paper records while copies moved to LACNIC.
The details matter. If only a public map had changed, applicants could still have confronted conflicting databases and uncertain historical evidence. By moving current and archived records under an audit trail, the institutions made LACNIC the place where the service history could be found and acted upon. Custody created continuity; continuity made the new boundary credible.
Contracts and invoices completed the cutover
The LACNIC transition also changed the commercial-administrative relationship. The plan called for a dual Registration Services Agreement phase. From 22 July 2002, a customer in the emerging region receiving service would be required to complete a LACNIC agreement in addition to the ARIN agreement. New members would complete both. Cover letters would specify when each agreement was effective.
That overlap is evidence against the idea that the region sprang into existence in one legal instant. For a period, the same customer relationship was deliberately carried by two institutions. The purpose was continuity while operational authority and records moved. The border was assembled through overlapping obligations before it became exclusive in routine practice.
Billing followed the same staged logic. LACNIC installed billing and tracking systems, received accounting records and began invoicing regional customers on 2 September. Money collected by LACNIC was initially transferred to ARIN, which returned a portion to sustain LACNIC. Those transfers were expected to stop at final recognition. Outstanding invoices would move at cutover.
An applicant may never see the recognition correspondence, but it sees an invoice. A holder may not study ICP-2, but it knows which entity sends the agreement and accepts payment. These ordinary acts are how an administrative border becomes enforceable in daily life. They create dependency, expectations and documentary evidence about the service relationship.
The plan also exposes what remains unknown. It describes what ARIN and LACNIC intended to do; it does not, by itself, prove that every task occurred exactly on schedule. It does not provide a holder-by-holder table showing who signed which agreement, who objected, who failed to respond or how unusual legacy arrangements were treated. A planned transfer is strong evidence of mechanism, not a complete history of consent.
Still, the mechanism is clear enough to reject two extremes. The LACNIC region was not a fiction: applications, DNS administration, records, contracts and invoices moved. Nor was it a sovereign territorial settlement: private institutions planned and executed the change through recognition and service instruments. Its border was an operational fact with a limited legal source.
AFRINIC redrew an already regionalised map
The later establishment of AFRINIC is an even sharper test because it altered service areas that had already become familiar. Africa had not been served by one registry from the beginning. Different parts of the continent and nearby islands had been handled by predecessor registries. Recognition of AFRINIC required those institutions to give up coverage and transfer responsibility.
APNIC’s 2005 annual report records a concrete boundary change. With AFRINIC’s full recognition in April 2005, Comoros, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mayotte, Réunion and Seychelles moved from APNIC to AFRINIC. APNIC reported that its service region was left with 56 economies.
The six places form a useful border case. They are in and around the western Indian Ocean, with different constitutional statuses and legal systems. Réunion and Mayotte are French territories; Mauritius, Madagascar, Seychelles and Comoros are independent states. Their movement was not a simple application of continental sovereignty. It was an administrative reassignment associated with AFRINIC’s emergence as the recognised registry for Africa and the Indian Ocean area.
Nor did the numbers themselves need to be renumbered merely because the registry relationship changed. The essential act was a transfer of service responsibility and records. Existing networks could continue routing while the institution responsible for future registry administration changed. This separation between the identifier’s operation and the recordkeeper’s service area is central. It shows why a border can be powerful without being embedded in packet forwarding.
APNIC’s report also describes cooperation with the other registries and AFRINIC. That supports a continuity explanation: the institutions were coordinating to avoid service disruption and duplicate administration. It does not supply every transfer letter, database schedule, member notice or objection. In particular, the annual report is written from APNIC’s institutional perspective. It records the result, not a complete account from every affected holder.
The change nevertheless proves that RIR regions are mutable. Six territories could leave one established service region and enter another when recognition and operational arrangements changed. If the map were a natural jurisdiction, such movement would require a theory of cession. In practice it required institutional agreement, transfer work and recognition.
Current lists preserve yesterday’s transitions
Once a transition is complete, history is compressed into a list. APNIC’s current service-region document says it serves 56 economies across Eastern Asia, Oceania, South Asia and South-eastern Asia and identifies them through ISO 3166 country codes. The list is clear, useful and operationally efficient.
ISO coding gives the region a standard vocabulary. Software can validate an applicant’s economy. Staff can route requests. Public pages can tell organisations where to apply. Reports can calculate membership and allocations by sub-region. A code list is more stable than an impressionistic statement about the “Asia Pacific.”
But standardisation can conceal contingency. ISO codes do not explain why a territory belongs to APNIC rather than another registry. They do not record the recognition decision, transition date, holder notice or historical predecessor. They make the current answer legible while omitting the argument that produced it.
ARIN’s current region page performs the same function for Canada, the United States and a set of Caribbean and North Atlantic countries and geographical areas. The resulting map is not a neat continent. It shares the Caribbean with LACNIC and includes island jurisdictions whose political links, languages and physical locations do not yield one obvious boundary rule.
The split Caribbean is especially instructive. Adjacent islands may be served by different registries. Political status, historical service arrangements, language, predecessor coverage and negotiated institutional practice can matter more than distance. A user looking only at a coloured world map may assume a geographic logic that the country list does not support.
The current lists should therefore be treated as authoritative statements of service practice, not as self-proving constitutional texts. They answer “which registry normally serves this place now?” They do not fully answer “who decided, under what procedure, after hearing whom, with which right of review?”
What makes the border practically exclusive
An RIR border has at least six reinforcing mechanisms. First is referral: central and peer institutions direct applicants to the registry assigned to the applicant’s location. Second is contracting: the assigned registry offers the standard agreement and related service terms. Third is billing: the same registry charges for membership or service. Fourth is record custody: its database becomes the normal source for registration history and authorised changes. Fifth is technical administration: reverse DNS, routing-security and directory services are organised around that record.
Sixth is recognition: peer institutions accept the registry as the responsible service provider for that area.
No single mechanism is sufficient. A country list without record custody is a claim. Record custody without peer recognition can produce conflicting ledgers. A contract without technical administration may purchase little. Technical service without a stable legal person and financial system may not endure. The border becomes durable when the mechanisms align.
This is why “enforceable” must be used carefully. The registry does not enforce its border like a state guarding a frontier. It normally enforces it by channel design. The wrong portal may redirect an applicant. A transfer may require coordination with the registry of origin or destination. A database update must be made where the record is held. A member cannot usually choose a different regional fee schedule simply by preference.
Channel design can be as decisive as a prohibition. When every accepted path points to one institution, exit becomes costly even if no police power exists. That is practical exclusivity. It deserves governance scrutiny precisely because it can affect valuable operational relationships without the formal safeguards associated with territorial government.
The appropriate response is not to deny that one normal service registry improves coordination. Duplicate authoritative registries could create inconsistent claims and operational risk. The response is to define the border modestly: it allocates administrative responsibility while preserving clear procedures for exceptions, transitions, disputes and continuity.
The strongest case for regional borders
Regionalisation solved genuine problems. A global registry operating from one location would have faced language barriers, time-zone delay, limited local knowledge and an ever-growing request load. Regional staff could build relationships with local operators, understand documentation practices and hold meetings closer to the networks they served.
The 1993 design also connected distribution to allocation efficiency and route aggregation. At the time, address-management choices were entwined with the rapid growth of routing information and classful address scarcity. Delegating blocks and responsibility could make administration more systematic. Those engineering concerns should not be rewritten as a mere territorial ambition.
The LACNIC transition was deliberately staged rather than abrupt. Dual agreements, second opinions, database snapshots, checksum-supported transfers and overlapping financial processes were continuity controls. AFRINIC’s recognition likewise involved cooperation among existing registries. These are signs of responsible operational planning.
A single service registry per area can also reduce applicant confusion. It supplies one accountable organisation for records, support and policy implementation. Current country lists are more usable than an open-ended rule asking every applicant to litigate the closest connection of its network each time it requests service.
These benefits explain why the borders endured. They also show why the best criticism is not that geography has no administrative value. Geography can organise service. The criticism begins when service organisation is made to carry claims it cannot support: political representation, ownership of regional resources, authority over all business conduct, or immunity from ordinary law.
Institutional legitimacy is strongest when it rests on the work actually performed. A registry can defend a border as a tested allocation of responsibility, supported by continuity and operator service. It weakens its case when it describes the same border as if it were a public jurisdiction over everyone inside it.
The consent gap
The public documents do not provide an operator-by-operator account of consent to either major transition. ICP-2 required broad LIR support, and transition planning involved incumbent and successor institutions. That is meaningful. It is not the same as a schedule of every affected holder, its contract status, notice, response and available objection route.
For LACNIC, the dual-agreement phase implies that customers were asked to sign new documents. The plan does not publish the acceptance denominator. How many customers signed immediately? How many needed remediation? Were any unable to accept Uruguayan terms? What happened to a holder that did not sign by the final date? Were legacy resources treated differently? The plan does not say.
For the APNIC-to-AFRINIC transfer, the annual report names the six territories but does not reproduce notices to each holder or the legal instruments for every record. It does not show whether a member could contest the destination registry, remain temporarily with APNIC or request a different arrangement based on corporate domicile.
Silence in the available record should not be converted into a claim of opposition. There may have been broad acceptance and few practical objections. The transitions may have improved service for most affected organisations. The evidence supports a narrower conclusion: the published institutional record does not demonstrate unanimous or individually documented consent.
That gap matters more today because registry relationships carry greater economic and security consequences than in the early allocation era. The governing agreement, transfer eligibility, record status, reverse DNS and routing-security services can affect financing, transactions and continuity. A border-change process designed now should disclose more than a project plan did in 2002.
At minimum, it should publish the affected population, contract-version map, notice method, objection channel, continuity protections, data-transfer schedule and final completion report. Broad support should be measured rather than invoked. Affected holders should know what changes and what does not.
Territory, domicile and network location are different facts
Part of the confusion comes from treating an organisation as if it occupies one place. A network group may be incorporated in one country, maintain its principal office in another, operate infrastructure in several others and serve customers globally. Its parent, subsidiaries and address-holding entity may not be located together.
A service-region rule must choose which connecting fact matters. Is it incorporation, headquarters, the location of network equipment, customer geography, the place where addresses are used, or the address of the contracting member? Current service lists identify covered countries and economies, but the historical materials do not supply one universal answer for every multinational case.
This matters at borders. A company incorporated in an ARIN country might operate almost entirely in LACNIC territory. A multinational may acquire a subsidiary whose records sit with another registry. A territory may change constitutional status without moving geographically. A network may transfer resources across regions under coordinated policy. None of those cases is solved by saying that the packet belongs to a continent.
The proper role of the region is narrower. It assigns a normal administrative home based on published eligibility rules. Exceptional cross-border situations then require contract and policy analysis. The region does not determine every law applicable to the holder, every place the address may be routed or every regulator with authority over the network.
This separation is also protective of the registry. If the institution claims only the service relationship defined by its documents, it can explain decisions with verifiable criteria. If it claims a wider territorial authority, every multinational fact becomes a challenge to its jurisdictional theory.
The map should therefore be read as an index into an administrative system. It is not a complete legal answer. The next article in this series addresses the related conflict directly: which law follows a holder when the registry, company, network, customers and insolvency estate point to different places.
Borders should have change rules
The historical transitions prove that service regions can change, but the current public lists do not provide a complete general procedure for future border changes. That is a governance weakness. Durable administrative boundaries need an amendment rule precisely because they are not natural.
A credible rule would start with a documented proposal identifying the affected countries, territories, holders, records, contracts and services. It would explain the reason for change and the alternatives considered. It would distinguish a territory-wide reassignment from a holder-specific exception.
Support should be measured across affected operators rather than inferred from a general regional meeting. Governments and public authorities may have relevant continuity concerns, but state input should not erase the contractual and operational interests of holders. Small networks, non-members and legacy holders should not disappear behind aggregate statements from large LIRs.
The implementation plan should include parallel service, data integrity checks, signed custody records, reverse-DNS and routing-security continuity, billing reconciliation and a rollback procedure. The 2002 LACNIC plan supplies much of the operational model, although modern security services would require additional detail.
There should also be a completion report. It should state what happened, not merely what was planned: records transferred, exceptions unresolved, notices delivered, contracts accepted, service incidents, objections filed and decisions made. Sensitive holder information can remain protected while aggregate denominators are published.
Finally, the rule should say what kind of claim the change does not make. Moving a territory from one registry to another changes service responsibility. It does not transfer sovereignty, vest ownership of addresses in a region or decide all laws applicable to the holder. That sentence would prevent administrative continuity from being inflated into political title.
Evidence that would improve the history
The strongest missing materials are executed transition instruments. For LACNIC, the public plan refers to letters transferring zones and records and acknowledgements of receipt. Publishing those instruments, with sensitive information redacted where necessary, would show which planned steps were completed and when final custody changed.
For AFRINIC, a consolidated schedule from each predecessor registry would make the boundary history much clearer. It should identify country and territory lists, categories of records, technical services, contract treatment and completion dates. APNIC’s report gives a valuable result for six territories, but not the whole multi-registry chain.
Version histories of current service-region documents are also needed. A reader should be able to see when each country code was added, removed, renamed or reclassified and which decision authorised the change. ISO changes can reflect state succession, territorial status or naming updates; those should not silently rewrite institutional history.
Holder notices and objection records would help assess legitimacy. Even aggregate figures—number of affected organisations, notices delivered, agreements re-papered, objections and exceptions—would distinguish broad acceptance from administrative assumption.
The divided Caribbean deserves a dedicated case study. It should trace why specific neighbouring jurisdictions entered ARIN or LACNIC, whether language, predecessor service, political affiliation or operator preference mattered, and how transfers now work across the line. That would test whether the present border remains justified by service rather than habit.
None of this evidence is required to establish that the borders operate. The portals, contracts and lists already establish that. It is required to explain how a powerful administrative arrangement gained legitimacy, how it can be changed and what protections apply to those affected by the change.
A more accurate vocabulary
Language can keep the legal categories clear. “Service region” is accurate when referring to the list of places normally served by an RIR. “Administrative responsibility” describes the duty to process requests and maintain records. “Recognition” describes acceptance of an institution as a regional registry by the coordinating system. “Transition” describes the movement of functions, records and relationships.
“Jurisdiction” should be used with a qualifier. A contract may select a court or law. A state regulator may have territorial jurisdiction. A registry may have contractual competence over a member account. Saying simply that an RIR has jurisdiction over a continent blurs those distinct sources.
“Regional community” should not be assumed to mean a represented population. It may describe entities, members or affected operators, but the speaker should identify which. Broad LIR support for a transition is not the same as authorisation by every state, user or holder.
“Regional resources” is similarly risky if it implies ownership. A registry may administer records associated with its service area. That does not establish that the addresses are political property of the region or that use outside the map is inherently illegitimate. Any use restriction must be traced to a specific applicable instrument, not inferred from colour.
This vocabulary is not hostile to regional coordination. It makes the arrangement easier to defend. Institutions gain credibility when they state the basis and limit of their role. Administrative borders can be useful without pretending to be constitutional borders.
The finding: practical borders, limited title
Before reaching the conclusion, one final distinction is necessary. Administrative durability can create reliance on both sides. Registries invest in staff, systems and security services for the places assigned to them. Members organise compliance teams, account access, contracts and transactions around the registry they have been told will remain responsible. A border change therefore cannot be evaluated only as an institutional right to rearrange coverage. It must also be evaluated as a change to accumulated reliance.
That reliance strengthens the case for notice and continuity, but it does not transform habit into sovereignty. Long use can make an arrangement legitimate as a settled service convention. It can make sudden change costly and require a high evidentiary threshold. It cannot retroactively supply a treaty or authorise unrelated control over commercial activity.
The same point applies to institutional recognition. Other registries and central coordination bodies may reasonably rely on one responsible operator for each area. Their recognition helps prevent duplicate administration. But peer recognition is strongest when it remains conditional on accurate service, continuity and accountable process. If it is treated as an irrevocable territorial title, the mechanism intended to preserve coordination becomes a barrier to repair.
The historical record therefore supports continuity with amendability. Keep a stable default registry so applicants and operators know where records belong. Preserve the ability to revise the assignment through a published, evidence-based transition when service, political status or operational reality requires it. Stability without a change rule becomes lock-in; change without continuity becomes disorder. The 2002 and 2005 transitions show that the system can avoid both extremes when it treats the border as an engineering and institutional responsibility rather than a possession.
The RIR regions acquired borders through accumulation. RFC 1466 supplied the early logic of distributed geographic administration. ICP-2 supplied recognition criteria for a proposed region and candidate institution. Transition plans changed where requests went and who made decisions. Contracts and billing changed the service relationship. Database and reverse-DNS transfers moved operational custody. Current ISO-coded lists preserve the result.
This chain gives the borders practical force. An applicant cannot usually ignore the assigned registry. A holder’s records, fees and service rights are connected to it. Peer institutions recognise it. Cross-region changes require coordination. In that limited but important sense, the borders are enforceable.
The same chain sets the limit. None of its links is a treaty grant of territorial government. Recognition is not sovereignty. Broad operator support is not a universal franchise. Database custody is not ownership. A country list is not legislation. Operational exclusivity is not political jurisdiction.
The 2002 LACNIC and 2005 AFRINIC changes make this visible because the map moved while the Internet continued to route. Institutions agreed, responsibilities shifted and records changed hands. No continent ceded territory. The service architecture was revised.
That is the durable conclusion. RIR borders should be respected as coordination arrangements where they preserve uniqueness, continuity and clear responsibility. They should be reviewable because they were made by institutions and can be remade by institutions. And they should never be used as a shortcut to claims of regional ownership or public authority that their history cannot bear.
A service map tells a network where to knock. It does not tell the world who rules the network after the door opens.