RIPE policies and routing, was Re: [address-policy-wg] 2009-06 New Policy Proposal (Removing Routing Requirements from the IPv6 Address Allocation Policy)

All,

I am neutral on this proposal, but I do have some thoughts about an
assertion that has been made several times in the discussion:

On Fri, 2009-05-29 at 01:09 +0100, Nick Hilliard wrote:
> On 26/05/2009 15:30, Filiz Yilmaz wrote:
> > PDP Number: 2009-06
> > Removing Routing Requirements from the IPv6 Address Allocation Policy
> 
> I support this proposal for the usual arguments:
> 
> - RIPE are not the routing police
> - important to maintain separation of address assignment policy from 
> routing policy

I think the idea that RIPE is not the routing police was mostly created
to prevent people from calling in the RIPE NCC when someone would not
peer with them or otherwise accept their advertisements. I do not think
that this idea is meant to say that RIPE policies cannot include any
routing requirements.

For example, in the ASN policy (currently RIPE 463) we see:

        Current guidelines require a network to be multi-homed for an AS
        Number to be assigned. Requests must show the routing policy of
        the Autonomous System.

As far as "policing" goes, RIPE is also not the DNS police, but we seem
to be quite happy to restrict reverse delegations based on a huge set of
checks (e-mail checks? really??):

        http://www.ripe.net/rs/reverse/delcheck/delcheck_descr.html


If we look at the global IPv6 allocation and assignment policy shared by
all RIRs (currently RIPE 466 in the RIPE region), they have the same
principles, one of which is "aggregation". The text reads (in part):
        
        Wherever possible, address space should be distributed in a
        hierarchical manner, according to the topology of network
        infrastructure. This is necessary to permit the aggregation of
        routing information by ISPs and to limit the expansion of
        Internet routing tables.
        
        This goal is particularly important in IPv6 addressing, where
        the size of the total address pool creates significant
        implications for both internal and external routing.
        
        IPv6 address policies should seek to avoid fragmentation of
        address ranges.

Note the last sentence there especially.

I observe that RIPE policies can and do dictate routing requirements.
Further, routing and address allocation are linked. Changing one will
affect the other. Otherwise we wouldn't bother trying to make
allocations that can be easily aggregated. 


I am *not* saying that it is a good idea to put routing requirements
into policies. But we should not reject such requirements simply because
"RIPE are not the routing police".

Cheers,

--
Shane