[address-policy-wg] Proposal 2010-2

On Fri, 2010-10-29 at 10:17 -0400, Milton L Mueller wrote:
> Consider:
> LIR 1, an incumbent, proves it needs a /16 to meet demand caused by growth in the number of its existing customers. 
> LIR 2, a startup, also proves it needs a /16 to start up
> 
> Your policy privileges any actor in the category LIR 2 and penalizes actors in category LIR 1.

Both LIRs would be eligible for address-blocks assigned from the general
pool. After depletion this means space that has been reclaimed or in
some other way returned to the RIR for reuse.

>  
> 
> Question 1: why are the customers of LIR 2 more important than the customers of LIR 1?

They are not. BOTH LIRs are expected to accomodate _growth_ in customer
numbers through IPv6. NEITHER will get a large enough adress-block from
the reserve to meet their growth needs. At most they'd get a /20 or /22
to establish transition services, no /16. The RIR's intention is to
provide your LIR2 with a small block they can use to provide
connectivity to existing IPv4 services for their IPv6 customers. 

> Question 2: why wouldn't LIR 1 form a new company and call it a startup to get privileged access to addresses? Or, might LIR 3, LIR 1's long standing competitor, form a new LIR to gain an advantage in the competition for resources? 
> 
> One could argue for your position by noting that LIRs who already have some blocks of ipv4 are in a position to economize on and/or NAT those addresses, whereas an ISP without any can't do that. That provides some answer to Q1. But it doesn't deal with the problems around Q2.
> 

Exactly. Most, if not all, networks of significant size have a small
chunk of spare addresses they can recycle for transition services. A new
LIR OTOH has nothing and could theoretically be blocked from entering
the market.


//per