RIPE Meeting |
RIPE 82 |
Working Group |
Address Policy |
Status |
Final |
Date: 18 May 2021, 10:30 -11:30 (UTC+2)
Chairs: Erik Bais, Gert Doering, James Kennedy, Leo Vegoda
Scribe: Suzanne Taylor
Link to stenography transcripts
Link to chat logs
Gert Doering, Working Group Chair
Gert opened the virtual meeting and explained that the working group was trying a new format this time whereby they asked participants to view the presentations ahead of time so that the majority of the session could be spent on questions and discussion. He took a poll to determine how many participants had already viewed the pre-recorded presentations and/or slides. Approximately half responded that they were not aware of that option, while 36% said they had seen some of the presentations and 14% responded that they had seen all of them.
Gert then approved the minutes from RIPE 81.
Erik Bais, Working Group Chair
Gert said that he had enjoyed his time as working group chair but would be stepping down.
Erik thanked Gert for his 18 years of service as chair and welcomed James Kennedy and Leo Vegoda as the two new co-chairs, since a decision had been made to have three co-chairs going forward.
Angela Dall'Ara, Policy Officer, RIPE NCC
The presentation is available at:
https://ripe82.ripe.net/presentations/8-RIPE-82-Policy-Development-Office-Update.pdf
Erik asked Angela whether there was anything that stood out from across the RIRs. Angela responded that things appear quiet in the RIPE NCC region because there are no policy proposals at the moment but said that there is a lot of discussion taking place. She said that the PDP is also under scrutiny in other RIRs, raising some challenging situations in AFRINIC. She also encouraged the group to visit other RIRs’ websites for information about their Inter-RIR transfers policies.
Jordi Palet Martinez, Moremar - The IPv6 Company, pointed out a correction in Angela’s slides regarding the number of proposals under appeal. Erik thanked Jordi for his clarification.
Angela reminded the group that LACNIC had just concluded their meeting and that APNIC would be having their meeting soon, so there would likely be some upcoming news from those regions.
There were no further questions or comments.
Marco Schmidt, RIPE NCC
The presentation is available at:
https://ripe82.ripe.net/presentations/7-RIPE82-Feeback-from-RS.pdf
Randy Bush, RGnet OÜ, asked why the working group wasn’t discussing the possibility of going back to a one-member-one-LIR policy. He said he understands the desire to not have to justify need across multiple points of presence, but he asked why, now that resources are not allocated according to need, there is not a policy for having one LIR per member.
Marco answered that this is likely a better question for the General Meeting, as the decision to allow multiple LIRs per member was one made several years ago by the RIPE NCC Executive Board. He agreed that there were unintended consequences as a result of the policy. Randy said that, while the Address Policy Working Group might not be able to make a decision on the matter, they can discuss the issues that it causes for Address Policy and could ask the membership to reconsider the policy.
Gert said that, as a consultant, he understands how some large companies might have the need for multiple LIRs due to internal complications and politics.
Hans Petter Holen, RIPE NCC Managing Director, said that allowing multiple LIRs had an economic effect in that many more organisations open accounts and pay membership fees than otherwise would have. He said that the fee structure is therefore tied to address policy, which is not necessarily ideal. He continued that although some members may require multiple LIRs, about 10% of RIPE NCC members do have multiple accounts and that, in the vast majority of cases, it is purely to obtain more IPv4 space. Hans Petter thanked Randy for bringing up the issue.
Jordi referred to a point from Marco’s presentation that the policy requirement to justify larger IPv6 allocations has been rendered useless, as they are requesting additional IPv6 via multiple LIR accounts.
Erik said that some members have an excessive amount of IPv6 address space because they’ve merged multiple LIRs that had received IPv6 allocations along with their final IPv4 allocations.
Marco said that the RIPE NCC has indeed seen cases of members stockpiling IPv6 via multiple LIR accounts, including via transfers, and not just as a byproduct of having received it along with IPv4 allocations. Jordi said that this constitutes abuse and should be stopped, and he and Gert briefly discussed the possible reasons for this, such as some people potentially thinking the value of IPv6 will increase in the future.
Rüdiger Volk, my UNorganized self, warned against instituting a strict one-member-one-LIR policy, as there as many business cases for enterprises to have different divisions, etc. He explained how, many years ago, he negotiated a split in his LIR with the RIPE NCC for legitimate business reasons. He said that a strict rule on this could also cause unintended consequences.
Lars Prehn, MPII, stated that there are currently about 120,000 globally visible IPv6 routes and asked, in light of IPv6 management becoming much simpler and every CIDR size up to /48 more or less propagating globally, how the working group expects the intentional lack of allocations requirements (up to a /29) to affect routing table growth in the future.
Gert responded that this should be addressed with aggregation requirements, and that there is a RIPE document that encourages aggregation but that it can’t be forced. He said that this is an important topic but that it couldn’t be solved during the session.
Wessel Sandkuijl, Prefix Broker BV, asked via the Q&A function whether /24s are regularly moved out of the reserved pool and into the free pool and if so, at what rate?
Marco said that they regularly move /24s out of the reserved pool but clarified that there’s a reserved pool for temporary assignments, etc. and that these go into quarantine for about six months before being moved into the free pool. He said about 20 /24s are released from quarantine and moved into the free pool per week, which is roughly equal to the amount being deregistered at the moment, although the number being deregistered is slowly decreasing.
Peter Hessler, DENIC, asked via the Q&A function how many of the announced allocations without assignments are announced as exactly the same size as the allocation.
Marco said he would have to look into allocations larger than /24 and respond on the mailing list. He said that out of 1,100 /24 allocations that are currently announced, 81% of these are without assignments.
Erik then discussed the possible change in the RIPE NCC Charging Scheme, which would lower initial fees, and asked whether Marco foresaw an increase in the number of new accounts as a result.
Marco responded that he does expect an increase in new members due to the increasing cost of IPv4 on the secondary market.
Hans Petter said that it’s important to make the distinction between a fee-per-LIR and fee-per-member policy. He explained that, under Dutch law, you can only have one membership per organisation. He added that, although allowing members to open multiple LIR accounts goes against the spirit of fairly distributing the remaining IPv4, if the policy didn’t exist, members would just have created fake organisations instead. He said that it would be worthwhile to discuss how to get around this problem and encouraged members to attend the discussion during the General Meeting on this.
There were no further questions or comments.
Nurani Nimpuno and Hervé Clément, ASO
The presentation is available at:
https://ripe82.ripe.net/presentations/49-2021-05-RIPE-82-ASO-AC-Update.pdf
Hervé Clément discussed the ASO AC appointments and informed the working group that the selection process for seat 9 of the ICANN Board was completed and would soon be announced, subject to the results of ICANN’s due diligence review. He also highlighted two further elections in 2021 – one for the ASO representative to the ICANN NomCom, and the other for seat 10 of the ICANN Board. He asked any interested candidates to contact him or Nurani. Nurani also encouraged anyone interested in the ICANN Board position to contact those who have previously served on the board.
There were no questions or further comments.
Ulka Athale, RIPE NCC
This presentation is available at:
https://ripe82.ripe.net/presentations/30-NRO-NC-Nominations.pdf
Ulka introduced James Kennedy, a candidate for the NRO NC, who presented himself to the working group and explained his reasons for running for the position.
There were no questions or comments.
James Kennedy, RIPE Database Task Force
This presentation is available at:
https://ripe82.ripe.net/presentations/40-DBTF-Update-AP-WG.pdf
Erik said there has already been some discussion on the mailing list about the video posted by Denis (Walker, Database Working Group Co-Chair). In response to that discussion, James clarified that the task force was not proposing removing any information currently contained in the RIPE Database. He gave the example of LIRs previously needing to demonstrate use of their existing address space before qualifying for additional space, which was primarily done via certain objects in the RIPE Database and questioned whether those were still required. He also discussed complications around registering contiguous IPv4 PA assignments in the RIPE Database and the possibility of removing that requirement.
Peter Hessler, speaking as an “Internet community member”, said that he has always been confused on the details of registering IP assignments in the RIPE Database, and welcomed detailed guidance on this topic.
Jordi Palet Martinez, speaking for himself, said that he agreed with Denis’s points and that he can’t back the work done by the RIPE Database Task Force.
Gert said that this is an opportunity to rethink what the working group wants in the RIPE Database. He said that 20 years ago, you could access the telephone numbers of the end customers holding various address blocks. Today, he said, it’s pointless to call the CEO of a company holding a block of addresses in order to report a problem. He said that the issue can’t be solved today, but that it should be discussed.
Erik added that the issue of duplicating the same information for /24 allocations that are being used by LIRs for their networks by needing to create assignments for these in the RIPE Database. He said that he’s already discussed this with Marco Schmidt and will have to see how they can move forward on that issue as well.
Remco van Mook, RIPE NCC Executive Board
This presentation is available at:
https://ripe82.ripe.net/presentations/36-why-pi-APWG-RIPE-82.pdf
Erik summarized Remco’s suggestions as trying to avoid as many additional statuses for inet(6)num objects (IPv4 and IPv6) without having any contractual agreements or statuses assigned or allocated to those, and let the contractual side be taken care of by the General Meeting and RIPE NCC Executive Board. Remco responded that Erik’s summary was reasonable and that the main point he was trying to make is that the RIPE Database should no longer be used to reflect business relationships between entities in the RIPE Database and the RIPE NCC.
Elvis Daniel Velea, V4Escrow LLC, suggested making all PI owners LIRs. Remco said that this is not what he was proposing and that this would be up to the RIPE NCC and its membership to decide. However, he said that if that were decided, RIPE Policy would have to allow for it, which it currently doesn’t.
Christian Bretterhofer, speaking for himself, said that phones numbers can be kept as customers move to different telcos and that this is what PI space is for. He therefore suggested having less PA space and more PI space.
Remco said he wasn’t qualified to answer that, but that if more IPv4 address space were found to be handed out, there could be a policy in place to turn that into PI space and that current /24 allocations have effectively become PI. He added that the only real difference between PA and PI space today is who you’re paying and how much you’re paying for the space.
Alex Le Heux, writing as an Internet user, asked whether the group could stop discussing phone numbers and “such silly details” and take a step back to ask what the RIPE Database needs to accomplish today, and then implement that. Both Remco and Erik voiced support for Alex’s suggestion.
Sergey Myasoedov, NetArt Group, stated that the RIPE NCC membership cannot decide RIPE policy and asked that consent not be sought from the membership without the consensus of the Address Policy Working Group. Remco said that this was exactly what he was trying to do with his presentation in the working group.
Petra Zeidler, DLR (AS28), asked how someone could look up what type of assignment a block of PI space has if that information is not included in the RIPE Database. Remco replied that there should be a contract in place for all address space, including PI space.
Peter Hessler, writing as an Internet community member, stated that he joined the Database Working Group because the RIPE NCC modified some of his objects in the RIPE Database without his knowledge as part of a cleanup effort by the working group, and urged that any modifications must be communicated to the affected contacts before taking place. Remco agreed.
Peter added that he has some PI space specifically because he doesn’t want his home address published in the RIPE Database or on the RIPE NCC’s website. Remco responded that this is no longer allowed by the GDPR anyway.
Daniel Karrenberg, RIPE NCC, asked whether the planned systematic review discussion would be taking place. This went unanswered.
Elvis Daniel Velea, V4Escrow LLC, stated that for this transformation to work, companies would still need to have a way of receiving address space without becoming a RIPE NCC member, such as the sponsoring LIR possibility that currently exists. He said this is extremely complicated and that he had proposed such a policy in 2015 and that perhaps a different approach could be found this time. Erik responded that one of the topics that Remco brought to the working group is to uncouple the contractual relationship from the information in the RIPE Database, and so the working group first needs to decide whether there could be a common status for any and all IP space (including allocated, assigned PI or legacy) without affecting the contractual relationship with the RIPE NCC or the intermediary LIR. However, he said that current policy wouldn’t allow for that and so a decision would have to be made by the RIPE NCC and its membership to have an overlook in the contractual relationships first.
There were no further questions or comments.
There was no presentation associated with this agenda item.
Leo explained that discussion on the mailing list recently had begun looking at whether it was worth doing a full review of RIPE Address Policy – some of which is decades old – and look at whether it is still fit for purpose in today’s world. Leo asked for comments and it was decided to continue the discussion on the mailing list. Several comments on the chat channel said there was value in such a review and asked for an interim Working Group meeting to continue discussing the topic.
Erik thanked Leo for the suggestion and said they would follow up.
Erik thanked the scribe, asked for discussion to continue on the Address Policy Working Group Mailing List and closed the session.