[address-policy-wg] Re: The emacs, X windows and Linux approach to policy making

With my AC hat off - and, indeeed, open to correction on my interpretation of
the process...

> First of all, imho there has been a fundamental flaw in this proposal,
> from the very beginning (and this has only become apparent in retrospct,
> so no criticism here! If I would have noticed in time I would be much
> happier now): this proposal tried to combine a global policy - which by
> def. is meant to direct IANA'S operation! - with a "humanitarian" or
> "political" resource-re-distributio aspect for recovered address space
> (if any) to apply equally in all regions.
> 
> So, actually, it combined a global policicy with regional policies.
> 
> The latter aspect failed. I don't want to get into details, or what my
> personal opinion is, just stick to the facts and the process.

I've been struggling with this, because I had the question: is there really no
such thing as a global policy which could reasonably be made contingient on
regional policies?

I think the answer is found by examining where consensus is achieved. In the
RIPE region, we require consensus to implement a policy, and then we require
consensus again to change it.

So it is for global policies - all regions must ratify it, then all regions
must ratify a change.

But if you have a global policy that mixes with regional policy, or is in some
way dependent on regional policy, then any one regional policy could change in
the future, quite legitimately. At that moment the global policy has not been
updated, and I assume that IANA operations are presumably still directed by it,
but one of the assumptions on which it was based is no longer valid.

So it just seems to me that making a global policy that affects, or is
dependent on, regional policy, will have problems that aren't easy to predict
or solve.

> So, my proposal would be to withdraw 2009-01 unconditionally, as being o.b.e.

I feel the same way. My memory is that RIPE held off ratification in the past
to see which way the global consensus went. Since it hasn't materialised, I
think that there's no benefit to "locking in" any given text in one more region.

All the best,
Dave

-- 
Dave Wilson, Senior Network Engineer
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