a. Arguments Supporting the Proposal

Removal of discrimination: prefixes of /25 and longer are routinely filtered by many network service providers on the Internet.  As many End Users who apply for PI assignments do so for the purposes of small-scale multi-homing, in practice the current assignment policies discriminate against these End Users.

Good stewardship:  there is significant evidence that End User applications significantly exaggerate their IP addressing requirements when applying for PI assignments in order to make their application qualify for a small PI assignments.  By removing the incentive for End Users to exaggerate on PI assignment application forms where that address space is required for multihoming, the RIPE NCC can perform institute better stewardship of IP number resources.

Precedent exists: /24-aligned PI assignment requests are accepted by other RIRs. This demonstrates that acceptance of this policy will not create any new or undesirable precedents for global IP address assignment policies.

Negligible effect:  There there is no evidence to suggest that implementation of this policy will have an appreciable effect on the IPv4 depletion rate, as the current policy requirements are routinely ignored due to exaggerated utilisation claims.

Discussion

The last suggested paragraph of 6.10 qualifies the first paragraph in the following ways:

1. It allows multihomed End Users with a requirement for one or more IPv4 PI addresses to qualify for a /24.

2. It allows multihomed End Users who can demonstrate a need for marginally more than a /24 to apply for two /24s, or in general to assign one more /24 to an End User who can justify at least a single /24 on the basis of the current policies.

3. It stops abuse by ensuring that an End User cannot repeatedly go back to the RIPE NCC to ask for more /24s on the same basis.

The wording used to describe a multihomed End User is inspired by the equivalent policy wording in ARIN, and was chosen to ensure that the global policy divergence is minimised if this policy is passed.

The current IPv4 PI assignment policies implemented by the RIPE NCC are based on the principal of justification by quantity of addresses.  While this approach works reasonably well when the End User has a requirement for larger numbers of IPv4 address, it discriminates against organisations who use small quantities of PI addresses, typically for multihoming this address space on the Internet.

The RIPE NCC has previously published PI assignment figures which provide strong circumstantial evidence that many End Users exaggerate the quantities of addresses required on their PI application forms in order to adhere to the current policy guidelines.  This is harmful to the RIPE NCC because it means that the organisation is not receiving accurate information on actual address space usage, but rather information based on what is likely to quality for a successful address application.

b. Arguments opposing the proposal

b. Arguments Opposing the Proposal

Timescales: it could be argued that on the basis that RIR IPv4 address depletion is likely to occur within less than a year, two years, that this policy is too late for there to be any point in implementing it.

Routing policy vs. addressing policy: it has been argued that this policy makes addressing policy contingent on Internet routing policies, and that the two should remain separate.