[address-policy-wg] Proposal for change to the IPv4 PI allocation policy

Hi,

Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
> 
> Hello.
> 
> Following a discussion between some people and the resulting request to
> bring the discussion here I would like to propose a change to allocation
> policy for small PI blocks.
> 
> Today it's a problem that the ISP industry BCP involves filtering all
> announcements smaller than /24 from BGP, this meaning that a smaller
> allocation from RIPE is pretty much unusual in the "real world" if you
> want to be on the public internet.
> 
> I would therefore like to see a discussion about making it an option to
> actually get a /24 for routing reasons, disregarding current policy of
> disallowing routing problems as justification to request an allocation
> bigger than you might be able to justify from address usage alone.
> 
> I know I ran into this problem when I first started in the ISP business
> around 1995, and it's still there, so might it be time to change? People
> with enough experience will creatively "enhance" (ie lie) address
> requests to actually reach the /24 size today, and people without
> experience will make an honest request and then run into practical
> problems with their newly allocated space when they want to use it in
> real life, due to it being filtered because it's too small according to
> industry BCP. This is of course a bad situation either way and I hope it
> can be rectified.

[...i assume you mean PI _Assignments_...]
The problem is, there is no way to tell anyone what prefixes they "have
to accept" or not, and i see "the common /24 filter" coming up soon in
my crystal ball (once again due to RAM/TCAM restrictions).
Filtering everything longer than /24 is just what the majority of ASs do
today.

Hence, no real way to put such an abitrary number in a policy document.

I have no problem with wasting IPv4 space at all, so i won't object any
change of the policy to allow people to get a /24 or /23 PI as minimum.
But what comes next? Same for IPv6? Let's assign /32 due to routing
reasons? (yes, yes, yes! stubborn /32-/35 filter-guys die die die :-) )

Probably we just should keep the policy, but put some more stress on the
routing issue in the supporting documents/FAQs, so "new" people don't
waste their time requesting 100 IPv4 PI Addresses or so and rant about
it after they started realizing that this probably isn't what they
wanted in the first place.
Though, that doesn't solve the "lieing" problem.

...just my 0.02EUR without thinking about the issue in deep since IPv4
is legacy anyways :-)

-- 
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= Sascha Lenz                  SLZ-RIPE          slz at baycix.de         =
= Network Operations                                                   =
= BayCIX GmbH, Landshut                  * PGP public Key on demand *  =
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