[address-policy-wg] 2008-01 New Policy Proposal (Assigning IPv6 PI to Every Inetnum Holder)

Filiz Yilmaz wrote:

> With the acceptance of this proposal, the RIPE NCC will conduct a one-time operation 
> to assign a /56 IPv6 PI prefix to all End Users with an IPv4 assignment registered 
> in the RIPE Database.

I agree with Jeroen here that both proposals should be binned 
immediately or reposted in two and a half months. I think (hope) the 
intention of 2008-01 was to get some discussion/movement into the whole 
PIv6 area again, which is desperately needed.

First of all, I don't think the majority is afraid of the idea of PI 
itself (the old "carriers want to constrain their customers" myth), the 
majority is afraid of running it like it is currently done for IPv4 in 
the RIPE region. I'm talking about PI space that is visible in the DFZ 
here of course, unannounced PI space should mostly be covered by ULA.

My main concern with IPv4 PI is that there is _no_ reasonable financial 
incentive to help weighting the pros (you got yourself independent 
addresses, yay) against the cons (_everyone_ _else_ needs an additional 
slot in the routing table). The main argument I heard about this is that 
getting PI space is not free either, because you need to pay the 
sponsoring LIR to do the work. Unfortunately, in most cases I have seen 
this work was never billed, because there was no need to do so. Due to 
the way billing PI space works in the RIPE region (scoring points, only 
once) LIRs, especially big ones, often don't pay a single cent for the 
space they have allocated, so everything they need to account for is 
work. PI requests which are reasonably well justified don't make that 
much work, and even if not, there are plenty of network 
engineers/hostmasters sitting around all day idling in IRC. :-)

This is at assigning time. Once the address space is assigned, it is 
basically free. Again there is _no_ incentive to reevaluate the need for 
this PI space, because renumbering is certainly causing some amount of 
work which is definitely not offset by the amount of money you will save 
by giving back this PI space (zero!). Again, there has been the argument 
that announcing a prefix is not free either, but there are plenty of 
operators that would gladly announce your PI prefix without additional 
costs if you buy their 50€ DSL/housing service. This is a very 
competitive market, at least here in Germany. After all, its just a few 
lines of routerconfig and if your are pedantic, the registration of the 
route object in the RIPE database. Announcing additional prefixes is 
not increasing your transit costs, so after it has been setup, it is 
free (again) for all parties involved (apart from the DFZ slot again).

After the prefix has been assigned, there is no real way for RIPE to 
track it. The PI space is not linked to a member, they don't exchange 
any information with the original requestor. Now we are at the end of 
the requestor's lifecycle (let's just assume it is a company, not 
personal PI space) and all its assets get dismantled. Normally, the PI 
space should be returned to the RIR, but at this stage of business only 
a minority cares about that. Hopefully the remainders have their 
announcements pulled at least, but is a rule with the well-known exception.

Now there is address space that can either be hijacked by anyone else or 
just "donated" to a former employee/fried of the owner/whatever 
(compensation?). This most certainly does not match the original PI 
request anymore, but unless RIPE is given enough clues about it they 
just can't know.

A solution to all this problems is already a RIPE policy proposal 
(2007-01, http://www.ripe.net/ripe/policies/proposals/2007-01.html). It 
does not discuss assigning a cost to this membership, but I think this 
is a generally understood that this membership is not going to be free. 
By assigning a _direct_ and _recurring_ fee to address space you don't 
fix every instance of a case mentioned above, but the majority. People 
will think about requesting PI space because there IS a cost figure 
directly assigned to it (and not to some weird scoring point for a third 
party), they should think about the necessity of the assignment every 
year when they get the bill and if the company gets shut down it either 
gets cancelled properly (there is a contract) or gets cancelled when the 
next bill is not paid up. Of course, someone who has been given that 
address space can just continue paying on his own, but he will think 
about the necessity as well. Of course, you can't revoke an announcement 
as easy as a domain, but by removing the inetnum, route(6) and domain 
objects from the RIPE database this fact is at least documented.

So, imho bin 2008-01, 2008-02 and 2006-01 now, get 2007-01 out with 
proper costs assigned (ARIN membership costs $500 a year, I don't want 
to discuss in this mail whether it should be higher or lower in the RIPE 
region and whether there should be a limit of resources assigned to one 
member) and _then_ (only then) discuss a proper PIv6 proposal that is 
similar to the other RIRs (e.g. minimum /48 from a certain prefix, 
requires membership). This can/should be done with PIv4 and ASN as well, 
but I don't think there is any legal loophole where you could apply it 
to the already assigned space.

Bernhard