[address-policy-wg] PA policy

On Tue, Jul 07, 2015 at 04:17:23PM +0000, Kennedy, James wrote:
>True. If indeed the "downstream" in this policy statement is in
>relation to the hierarchical registry system rather than in BGP
>transit terms, then yes PA customer assignments that are routed
>separately to the LIR are valid.

Actually, even assignments which are *not at all* connected to
the Internet are valid. In practice, the vast majority of
assignments will be downstream of the assigning LIR due to the
routing issues mentioned earlier in the thread.

>I raised the question as I've heard several community members
>complain, validly IMO, about some LIRs that have accumulated
>vast v4 PA allocations that are technically autonomous to the
>LIR.  Seems strange to have been allowed, especially considering
>the market value on these resources now.

It is allowed because the intention of the policy was never to
impose a hierarchy on the structure of the Internet, merely to
have a distributed registry, rather than one huge juggernaut.

And yeah, the phrasing is sufficiently ambiguous for this to have
come up on the list before...

rgds,
Sascha Luck