[address-policy-wg] 2022-02 New Policy Proposal (Remove mandatory IPv4 PA assignment registration in the RIPE Database)

Hi,

On Tue, Oct 04, 2022 at 09:43:54AM +0200, Angela Dall'Ara wrote:
> A new RIPE Policy Proposal, 2022-02, "Remove mandatory IPv4 PA 
> assignment registration in the RIPE Database"
> 
> is now available for discussion.

This seems to be very similar to the pre-proposal sent by Jeroen in May,
which did not meet overwhelming support.  Like, I was highly sceptical,
and had a sub-discussion with James about the suspected intent, and
nobody spoke up in favour of going this way.

This formal proposal has some changes to the pre-proposal, but I can
still not support the motivation - one of the fundamental pillars of
RIPE address policy is "documentation", so argueing with, quote,
"unnecessary efforts by LIRs to register IPv4 prefixes and by the RIPE
NCC to ensure that LIRs complied with the policy" will meet very strong
resistance from side.

If we want to do away with registration requirements because we think
that knowing the holder of an address block is less important nowadays,
then say so.  But "the inconvenience of following the policy" is a very
bad reason to do away with it. 

The second rationale is "there is too much stuff in the DB that should
not be there" - since this was put in voluntarily by over-eager LIRs
(as it seems), I (still!) do not see how changing the registration from
"mandatory" to "voluntary" would change that.

I think having a BCP document that explains to LIRs what the community
expects to see in the RIPE DB ("for a netblock that has /32s assigned
to private end users, documenting the block only is considered better 
than having end user data in the RIPE DB", and stuff like that) is a 
much more useful way forward with perceived inconsistency between the
way LIRs handle the existing lack of guidance in this respect.


Technically, the "new policy text" wouldn't work the way it is written
- it says "Registration is the final step in making an allocation", but
the sentence before that says "... not mandatory".  Now what?

Also, "New Policy Text" brings a new section 3.0 after 4.0 :-)


Ceterum censeo: I still oppose this.

Gert Doering
        -- LIR admin, responsible for DB objects and end user assignments
-- 
have you enabled IPv6 on something today...?

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