RE: [address-policy-wg] 2007-08 New Draft Document Published (Enabling Methods for Reallocation of IPv4 Resources)

[<michael.dillon@localhost]

> >    It is contrary to the goals of this document
> >    and is not in the interests of the Internet 
> >    community as a whole for address space to be
> >    considered freehold property. 
> 
> Why should an IPv4 policy document take IPv6 policy documents 
> into account?  "Different circumstances".

Same stakeholders. Same organization. And the statement does not
make any distinction between the two versions of IP.

> > 2007-08 should be rejected because no consensus has been formed and
> 
> This is exactly the point of a "v3" of this document: take 
> into account previous discussions and comments, and try 
> finding a consensus on the reworked document.
> 
> The argument "I reject this version because no consensus was 
> formed on a previous version" is not a very useful 
> contribution, in itself - if you have specific issues with 
> *v3* (or your concerns about v1 and v2 are still 
> un-addressed), please voice them.

When there is a huge lack of consensus in favour of a policy
proposal, that proposal should be abandoned. It goes against
consensus to continually make small changes to the proposal
and extend the whole process by months or years. This does not
help the stakeholders in RIPE and I do not believe that this
is what people expect from the WG chairs.

But you asked for specific issues. Let's start with ETNO's
concerns that a transfer system cannot ensure a process that
is open, transparent and equitable. By opening the door to 
private negotiations and agreements between LIR's, you will 
have destroyed the very foundation of RIPE, which is openness,
transparency and fairness.

Eric Schmidt feels that transfers open up more possibilities 
for abuse. This is what happens when you allow for secret
agreements.

Jay Daley says that reclaim/reuse could be more efficient than
transfers. This is quite likely when you consider that the entire
free pool must be in RIPE's hands, therefore there is the greatest
possibility of aggregation of blocks, by rejecting 2007-08 and 
keeping the current system.

Per Heldal mentions legal implications for RIPE. Clearly one of
those is the conflict between the statement of principle in the
IPv6 policy, and the enabling of transfers for IPv4. How will the
courts react to numbers which are freehold property, and others
which are not?

Edited versions of the policy proposal cannot fix these issues.

--Michael Dillon