[address-policy-wg] Re: how 200 /48's fails the job

> However, our focus is on medium-size and large customers, which are
> quite unlike residential end-user customers where 200 would be next to
> nothing. I doubt we'll have 200 such customers (without creative
> accounting, that is) in a while yet, but we are still doing active
> business. The current rule effectively prevents us from deploying IPv6
> to our customers.

I think that the current rule puts RIPE in violation of the
EU guidelines on horizontal cooperation agreements. 
http://europa.eu.int/scadplus/leg/en/lvb/l26062.htm
In particular, I believe that it is an unfair
limitation of ouput. Of course, I am not a lawyer, but
nevertheless, the 200 limitation seems rather dodgy and
artificial. I realize that RIPE serves more than just the
EU but I think that even in Russia, central Asia and the
middle East, there are similar competition laws.

As policymakers, we have to be concerned with the legal
environment around us, and therefore this limit must be
removed. From an engineering viewpoint there is no clear
justification for this limit. In all the discussion to date
the only thing that seems to have solid engineering justification
is that IPv6 /32 addresses cannot be handed out to everyone
who wants one. There must be some technical justification
for the request, such as the plan to run an IPv6 network
that internetworks at least two IPv6 networks. In most cases
these two or more networks can be distinguished by being
physically disjoint, i.e. two separate buildings or cities.
But Internet exchanges and large hosting facilities are
in a single location but they are clearly internetworks
from the engineering point of view.

So if we want a policy that includes a limitation based on
real engineering, how do we word it? And how do we ensure
that the terms we use are clearly defined. In the past,
many such policies have use very ill-defined and vague
terminology that often conflicts with the normal English
usage of words. Is there a way to define an IPv6 internetwork
so that the policy gives clear guidance to RIPE hostmasters
but does not fall afoul of EU competition rules?

> While routing table growth is a concern, not having (v6) routing table
> growth is in my opinion an even larger concern. Therefore my view is
> that the arbitrary fixed criterion of having to be "large" (for
> whatever value of large) for a v6 allocation should be dispensed with.

I really think that the original makers of the policy
were not trying to define "large" but were trying to
find a way to define an internetwork as distinct from
an end site. If we look at the IPv6 Internet as a hierarchy
with large high-bandwidth international networks near the root
and individual offices at the leaves, then we can see that
leaves have a single connection but all other nodes in the
hierarchy have two or three or more connections. All the
non-leaf nodes are internetworks. 

The natural processes of corporate growth and consolidation 
will limit the number of non-leaf nodes in this hierarchy so
that it will form some type of flat pyramid. These same
mechanisms limit the growth of the global routing table
and therefore I feel confident that giving out a /32 to
any internetwork with plans to deploy IPv6 will not create
a routing table crisis.

It would be nice if RIPE could find some university to do
a study of the network economy to understand this hierarchy
better and give us the information to predict the future
number of nodes in the hierarchy. I will note that Merit
in the USA recently got a graduate student to do an analysis
of questionnaires from several years of NANOG meetings.
It's not network engineering but this kind of research is
still very useful to policymakers.

--Michael Dillon