In the period since the last Roundtable Meeting (held in September 2012 during the RIPE 65 Meeting in Amsterdam), there have been a number of significant developments of interest to governments, including the ITU's World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) and the emergence of a trade in IPv4 address blocks.

The agenda of this week's Roundtable Meeting reflected those developments. RIPE NCC Registration Services Manager, Andrea Cima, led a discussion of IPv4 address management in the RIPE NCC service region. Feedback from participants focused on issues including:

• The potential size and duration of a global IPv4 market
• Strategies to avoid speculation, including needs-based assessment for approval of intra- and inter-RIR resource transfers
• Potential for the politicisation of concerns about IPv4 address availability in various governmental forums

Discussion also centered around developments in the IP address registry system, with RIPE NCC Director of External Relations, Paul Rendek, reporting on the RIPE NCC's engagement with the ITU and discussions around the establishment of an "Arab RIR". Participants were able to provide some important feedback and perspectives, such as: 

• Ongoing and improved communication between the technical community and public sector is vital to informed public policy-making
• An NRO-led response to the online consultation by the ITU Council Working Group on international Internet-related public policy issues (CWG-Internet) is important; it is also vital that the RIPE NCC respond to the issues raised (regarding IPv4 policies) ahead of the World Telecommunication/ICT Policy Forum (WTPF) in May, as many of these issues will also be discussed there
• The issue of "Enhanced Cooperation" (a concept that emerged from the WSIS events) will continue to be politically sensitive over the coming year, particularly with the establishment of the UN CSTD Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation
• While many governments support multi-stakeholder model of Internet governance, it would be useful for the Internet technical community stakeholders to document specific evidence of the multi-stakeholder model's successes.

Finally, Emile Aben, System Architect with the RIPE NCC Research & Development Group, showcased some of the statistical and analytical tools being developed by the RIPE NCC, and their relevance for policy makers. Subsequent discussion demonstrated the public sector's strong interest in this work, particularly in tools that can be used for comparative analysis of Internet trends.

The feedback and discussions that the RIPE NCC Roundtable Meetings facilitate are an important factor in shaping the RIPE NCC's strategy in Internet governance, and are a valuable opportunity for public sector representatives to inform their own decision-making. They can also inspire discussion in more open community venues, including the RIPE Cooperation Working Group, which will meet at RIPE 66 in Dublin this May.

If you would like more information about upcoming RIPE NCC Roundtable Meetings, please contact us at roundtable _at_ ripe _dot_ net.

• What is the multi-stakeholder process?
• Who pays for the Internet’s infrastructure?
• What role will governments have in Internet governance?

Under an over-arching goal of ensuring the informed development of public policy relating to the Internet, the RIPE NCC has a number of areas of priority over the coming 12 months. These are:

• Increasing understanding of the benefits of Internet Exchange Points and local peering
• Building more effective regional engagement on Internet governance issues
• Engaging effectively with the ITU and its Member States on Internet governance

The RIPE NCC is eager to hear from all of our stakeholders, including the RIPE NCC membership and broader RIPE community, on what issues are important and how the RIPE NCC can most effectively represent its community. We facilitate this feedback through a range of forums and activities, including the RIPE Cooperation Working Group and RIPE NCC Regional Meetings.

Read the full article on RIPE Labs.

The RIPE community supports all efforts to assist in the deployment of IPv6, especially in developing countries.

However, we note concerns being expressed within the ITU by a few members, most recently in the ITU IPv6 Group, that the current address management system is inadequate.

The RIPE community mandates the RIPE NCC to work with the ITU IPv6 Group, individual ITU members, and the community to clearly identify these concerns and to find ways to address them within the current IP address management system.

This statement will be sent to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) to reiterate the RIPE community's belief that the current address management system works. The RIPE NCC will continue to participate actively in the ITU IPv6 Group and report back to the RIPE community.

Where: APNIC 29, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
When: 14:00 - 15:30 (UTC +8), Wednesday, 3 March 2010

APNIC is an ITU-D sector Member and will attend the ITU IPv6 Working Group meeting in March that has been commissioned to study this issue in depth. APNIC will be reporting feedback from our Consultation to ensure community feedback is heard.

Topics of discussion

1. Where is the demand for this alternative system coming from? Would competition between IP address management systems bring any benefits to current and future Internet stakeholders?
2. Is it realistic to expect the policies of an alternative model as proposed by the ITU, to be consistent with RIR policies? Would the possibility of nationalized addressing systems lead to divergent policy systems? What would be the risks to the Internet of divergent policy environments?
3. If the ITU were to become an Internet registry, how would the ITU model affect the existing RIR model of open, bottom-up, and consensus-driven policy-making?

More detailed information is available on:
http://meetings.apnic.net/29/program/consultation

How can you participate?

Onsite

APNIC 29, Conference Hall 2, Kuala Lumpur Convention Center, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Remotely

Remote participants can watch via webcasting and can ask questions and make comments for the record via Jabber Chat. These tools can be adjusted to accommodate low bandwidth.

Submissions

APNIC is accepting written submissions. Please post your submission, identifying your name and affiliation and your comments on any or all of three discussion topics as well as general comments to:
ipv6 _at_ apnic _dot_ net

More Information

For more information on remote participation, visit:
http://meetings.apnic.net/29/remote
For more information on the APNIC 29 program, visit:
http://meetings.apnic.net/29

For further assistance, contact: helpdesk _at_ apnic _dot_ net

APNIC Secretariat
Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) Tel: +61-7-3858-3100
PO Box 2131 Milton, QLD 4064 Australia Fax: +61-7-3858-3199
Level 1, 33 Park Road, Milton, QLD
http://www.apnic.net

ICANN, the Internet Society (ISOC), and the Number Resource Organization (NRO) cooperate to ensure the successful coordination of the Internet's technical infrastructure.

According to a press release by the corporation, the organisations will stress the importance of participation from all levels of society, including End Users, governments, the private-sector, business, and technical communities, in discussions, debates, activities, and policy development processes on the development, governance, and coordination of the Internet.

"Participation is essential to keeping the Internet open and accessible to all,” Chair of the NRO Raúl Echeberría said.

"Individuals and organisations collectively make the policies, approve the procedures, and write the standards that make the Internet the efficient and effective system it is today," he added.

Giovanni Seppia of ICANN noted, "Following the outcome of the World Summit on Internet Society (WSIS) and the recent first meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), the ITU Telecom World is a valuable opportunity for all the Internet community organisations to continue ongoing outreach efforts and to stimulate a constructive dialogue with the community."

The Internet Pavilion at Telecom 2006 builds on the success of the Internet Pavilion program that was launched at the WSIS meeting in Tunis in November 2005. The Internet Pavilion at Telecom World 2006 will also feature Asia-based Internet community organisations, including APAN, APIA, APTLD, and ASIA.

ICANN, ISOC, and the NRO promote the long-established bottom-up structures that enable new participants to bring ideas into the open and transparent decision-making processes upon which these organisations are based. The efficient functioning of the Internet involves community coordination that is well-established and provides flexibility to adapt to the ever-changing Internet environment.

This item was first published by ag-IP News.

Introduction

The purpose of this document is to examine the ITU-T’s proposal for introducing competition into the allocation of IP addresses through the proposed establishment of national IPv6 address registries. This document will examine some of the assumptions about IP addresses that underlie the proposal and will provide a list of the significant issues that the proposal raises regarding Internet infrastructure and the related task of address resource management. While it is true that some of the assumptions that underlie the proposal are valid, such as the importance of IP addresses as part of a global, public network infrastructure, it is also true that the proposal as it stands could negatively impact on that critical network infrastructure. This document describes some of the key problems that would be caused by the ITU-T proposal, such as the elimination of the interest in a common network, the creation of policy dilution and the elimination of routing integrity and security.

The Proposal

In recent months a proposal has been made for the introduction of competition into the system of allocation of IP addresses. The proposal has been made by Houlin Zhao of the ITU-T for the ITU-T to establish new IPv6 address registries in each nation, each of which would compete with the existing Regional Internet Registries (RIRs).

This proposal can be found at: http://www.itu.int/ITU-T/tsb-director/tut-wsis/files/zhao-netgov02.doc

This proposal has been published as part of the broader program of work associated with Phase II of the World Summit on the Information Society (http://www.wsis.org).

A summary of the essential elements of this proposal is:

• to allocate an IPv6 address block to the ITU-T, who would then allocate to each nation a contiguous address block, sufficient to meet the needs of its national population
  • The precise nature of how the size of such national address blocks would be determined is not specified in the proposal, so details as to what would constitute a national requirement and the anticipated timeframe of such an allocation are also not described.
• that each nation would establish a national registry framework to manage their national address block
  • Whether this would be established as a central service entity within each nation, or a set of such entities within each nation, is not covered in the proposal. Whether this would be a function of a public agency or one that is part of a national, deregulated industry structure or some other arrangement is not specified.
• that such national address registries would be expected to operate in competition with the established Regional Internet Registry (RIR) system
• that domestic entities would have a choice of obtaining IPv6 address space using a RIR or using the national address registry service.

Some Assumptions about Address Attributes

There are a number of underlying assumptions about the characteristics of IPv6 addresses that lie behind the ITU-T’s proposal, and it is useful to enumerate these in broad terms.

• Addresses are a global resource
  • By inference of their property of being a intrinsic component of a global communications infrastructure, IP addresses are also validly to be considered as a global resource. In the context of the ITU-T’s perspective of global activities as being a matter of coordination and collaboration of various national activities, the logical implication is that this is an international issue of resource allocation, and the resource should be distributed in a manner that is fair in terms of relative amounts of resource allocation to each national entity.
• Addresses are a public resource
  • Public communications systems form part of a public utility service, and the components of their infrastructure can be validly considered as resources that form part of the public good. Following this line of argument, as a public resource, national public policy processes should be capable of setting national address access, distribution and use policies, as determined by national policy environments.
• Addresses are a critical resource
  • Each nation should be able to secure national access to address resources irrespective of actions by other national entities, or indeed by any entity that does not fall within the national domain.
• Addresses are a network resource
  • Access to the benefits of Internet-based communications services by a national community are predicated by enabling access to address resources by that community. Securing access to addresses by national communities is not an end, in and of itself, but is an essential prerequisite for utilising the benefits and opportunities of access to the common communications service.
• Addresses are an infinite resource
  • This is perhaps an overstatement of the assumption. The key aspect here is that the total capacity of the address plant is sufficient to accommodate the cumulative sum of national requirements across some 200 nations, in addition to the requirements of the established RIR system. Irrespective of the mechanism of determining national allocations, there is assumed to be sufficient address resources available to meet these requirements.

Some Issues with the proposal

As it stands, the proposal raises some significant issues that appear to be counter to the experience gained to date in the deployment of Internet infrastructure and the related task of address resource management. While this is not a complete list, and does not represent an exhaustive analysis of each of these issues, the following is a summary of the most apparent areas where the proposal raises matters of concern.

• The proposal leads to the creation of policy confusion in addressing
  • The ITU-T framework respects national sovereignty, and does not operate though mandate, but uses a structure of recommendations.
    Allowing each national address registry to operate under a nationally determined policy does not induce an outcome of conformity across all policy regimes. The expression of concern here is that this has a direct impact on the stable and scaleable operation of the Internet’s routing system, and also leads to concerns about the authenticity of addresses described in associated route objects. There is a relatively high level of aggregation constraint that is necessary to ensure that the routing environment continues to scale to the size of the network. It is unclear how such a diverse set of address policy domains will be capable of expressing this necessary common constraint. In addition, in a broad spectrum of national public policy regimes it is reasonable to expect that some regimes may elect to associate binding national address use policies with national address distribution channels. To date the policies that can be expressed in the network relate to path preference selection, while address use constraints, such as variations of propagation controls, have proved difficult to integrate into the routing system.
• The proposal does not align to regional and global business models
  • The Internet has developed in a regime of progressive liberalization of the global telecommunications environment. Many industry players operate in a number of national regimes. If an enterprise had to operate their network within the constraints of a collection of address policies, and likely also a collection of diverse and potentially conflicting national address use policies, it would impose a significant additional imposition on industry. Does it ultimately benefit the provider of the end user if a global or regional service enterprise is required to deal with up to 200 different address sources, each with various potential use constraints placed on such addresses?
• The proposal creates competition regimes based on policy dilution
  • The likely outcome of competitive address distribution systems in an unregulated regime would be the progressive dilution of associated access policies and procedures, and a continuing acceleration in address space allocation rates. This would lead to premature exhaustion of the entire address pool, even one as large at the IPv6 address space, resulting from poor constraint signalling within the market due to the partitioned nature of the market and the particular nature of addresses as a market commodity. This outcome would appear to compromise the fundamental goals of responsible stewardship of a finite, common public resource, and would create irrevocable outcomes resulting from an artificially excessive consumption of the resource.
• The proposal creates impetus for rapid consumption, hoarding and address trading markets
  • The poor signalling in such a competitive, partitioned supply system would increase the constraint of a finite supply. Together with common policy dilution, as well as deliberate national reserve hoarding, this would rapidly lead to induced rapid consumption of the entire available resource. This hoarding behaviour, coupled with the exhaustion of the neutral supply of new addresses into the market, would lead to the generation of trading markets, where addresses are placed into the role of a commodity supply. The consequent distortion of the role of addresses would have negative impacts on the network, running the risk of addresses being withheld from the network so that they could be released with potentially higher exploitative returns on the associated trading market. This also leads to incentives for address fraud in order to reap the rewards of generating more addresses into the trading market for rapid financial gain. It is also possible for national entities to see this as a form of foreign income, in the same manner as existing practices in certain country code domain names. This could result in national address blocks being deliberately withheld from meeting local needs in order to facilitate the formation of a trading market upon which the withheld resources could be played as a foreign currency revenue stream. To call this form of outcome chaotic and undesirable should be considered an understatement.
• The proposal has no visible relationship to known routing capabilities
  • Address distribution functions are deliberately constrained in order to achieve a number of common outcomes. One of these outcomes is to limit the number of address prefixes that enter the routing system, in order to ensure that the routing system stays within the constraints of its own capabilities. The removal of that constraint through the progressive dilution of address distribution policies as they relate to aggregation capability would potentially place unconstrained growth strains on the routing system. There is also the risk that national address use constraints would be introduced which would assume a level of policy-based control over route propagation that would conflict with the capability of Internet routing technology.
• The proposal eliminates the common interest in one network
  • This proposal may well place shorter-term national interests above the common network interest, leading to a localized set of interests being considered more important than the network itself. The question here is whether national registry structures will be willing to apply constraints to their function in order to meet a common objective of a scaleable and sustainable routing system. Environmental economics has previously demonstrated that, in such situations, it is often the case that longer-term, common interests are not given primary importance.
• The proposal compromises any hope of enhancing routing integrity and security
  • The proposal eliminates the goal of a robust and resilient trust hierarchy to support a viable, secure network routing environment. Distributed trust systems, such as those being proposed for securing inter-domain routing and securing the integrity of the address plant when it is passed into the routing environment, rely on a clear grounding in reliable trust anchors. It is an open question whether every nation state at all times would be able to operate such a system at such levels of integrity. This question is particularly relevant when there are potential benefits in operating an address registry in a competitive environment where the competition discriminator includes policy dilution.
• The proposal creates further churn in perceptions of the stability and viability of IPv6
  • In the case of the Internet, addressing lies at the very heart of the network. Without a framework of stable, unique and ubiquitous addresses there is no single cohesive network. Without a continuing stable supply of addresses, further growth of the network simply cannot be sustained. Without absolute confidence in the continuing stability in this supply chain, the global communications industry will inevitably be forced to look elsewhere for a suitable technology platform to meet the needs of networked data communications. If the industry is pushed into such an uncomfortable position of turning its attention elsewhere, simply because the Internet is incapable of operating its infrastructure in a stable, consistent and cost effective manner, this would be a most unfortunate, unintended outcome for the Internet and the billions of current and future users of this uniquely valuable common resource.

Some Options to Respond

There are some options for consideration by a broader community of stakeholders related to this proposal. On the basis of a considerable body of experience gained in the task of address stewardship of Internet protocol addresses there are a number of ways in which the Regional Internet Registry community could offer some form of contribution to the ITU-T and also to the World Summit for the Internet Society, wherein this ITU-T proposal may be considered.
Agree: It may be that the general perception of the benefits of this form of diversity of address distribution far outweigh the concerns here, in which case the appropriate option may be to encourage this proposal to move forward.
Disagree: On the other hand, it may be that the general perception of the risks associated with this proposal are at such a level that the proposal, if implemented in any form, would unleash an irrevocable set of actions that would threaten the future viability of adoption of the IPv6 global network. In such a case it would be responsible to disagree strongly with the proposal and highlight the basis upon which such disagreement is based.
Discuss: Another option is to ‘discuss’. If there is a perception of validity in the set of assumptions relating to attributes of addresses, and in the related proposition that national interests are an integral component of this environment, then further discussion would be necessary. In such a scenario there may be value in an exploration of mechanisms that could accommodate the underlying perspectives and mitigate, or even eliminate, the current collection of concerns associated with the current ITU-T proposal.

UK ISPA is a Trade Association for providers of Internet services and promotes competition, self-regulation and the development of the Internet industry. The UK ISPA council nominated the RIPE NCC for the award as recognition “for their efforts to stop the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) from undermining the tried and trusted systems of Internet governance, with the threat of bureaucracy, government interference and disruption to the very essence of why the Internet is a success.”

The Internet Hero shortlist reflects the UK ISPA Council’s opinion