PI vs PA Address Space

Daniel,

I'm somewhat concerned about the text:

    The regional IRs cannot do this because they would face
    determining who is a service provider and who is not as well as
    enforcing minimum sizes for address allocations.  This would
    amount to nothing less than the registries regulating Internet
    service provision.  So far no practical policies for these
    determinations have been suggested let alone met with community
    consensus.

There is a logical leap here that I'm just not following.  Suppose
that some organization requests space from an IR.  How does knowing
whether or not they are an ISP matter?  I would submit that the IR
must allocate PA (i.e., "leased") address space to the organization
regardless of their business status.

I suspect that the (faulty) thinking here is that folks who ARE an ISP
_automatically_ get PI space.  This is NOT the intent of what we've
been doing, at least as far as I know.

As to practical policies, RFC 1518 outlines some obvious cases
(e.g., multihoming) which do deserve PI space.  I would hope that this
could be the basis of some well-thought out policies.  I should also
point out that no one is going to propose policies other than the
IR's.  Have fun writing...  ;-)

Tony