[ppml] Policy Proposal 2005-1: Provider-independent IPv6 Assignments for End Sites - to be revised

[Member Services]

The ARIN Advisory Council (AC), acting under the provisions of the ARIN
Internet Resource Policy Evaluation Process (IRPEP), has reviewed policy
proposal 2005-1 and has determined that while there is no community
consensus in favor of the proposal there is consensus that the proposal
should be revised and discussed further. The AC made this determination
at their meeting at the conclusion of the ARIN Public Policy meeting on
October 27, 2005. The results of the AC meeting were reported by the
Chair of the AC at the member meeting. This report can be found at
http://www.arin.net/meetings/minutes/ARIN_XVI/mem.html

The AC will work with the author of the proposal to make the community
suggested revisions and return the proposal to the ppml for further
discussion.

The current policy proposal text is provided below and is also available
at http://www.arin.net/policy/proposals/2005_1.html

The ARIN Internet Resource Policy Evaluation Process can be found at
http://www.arin.net/policy/irpep.html

Regards,

Member Services
American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN)


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Policy Proposal 2005-1: Provider-independent IPv6 Assignments for End Sites

Policy statement

Add new subsection to the NRPM:

     6.5.8. Direct assignments to end sites

         6.5.8.1. To qualify for a direct end site assignment, an
organization must:

            1. not be an LIR;
            2. be an end site;
            3. be currently multihomed using IPv6 to two or more
separate LIR's using at least one /48 assigned to them by each LIR.
            4. be able to assign IPv6 addresses to at least 100,000
unique devices within 1 year and advertise that connectivity through
it's single aggregated address assignment.

         6.5.8.2. Direct assignment size to end sites

         Organizations that meet the direct end site assignment criteria
are eligible to receive a direct assignment of /44
         6.5.8.3. Subsequent direct assignments to end sites

         Only one direct assignment may be made to an end site
organization under Section 6.5.8

Policy Rationale

The original proposal 2005-1 would have provided for a Provider
Independent IPv6 allocation to anyone who could qualify for an
Autonomous System number. While this proposal failed to reach consensus
at the ARIN XV meeting in Orlando in April 2005, the Advisory Council
agreed there was sufficient interest in the proposal to see if it could
be recrafted into a proposal capable of reaching consensus.

The main objections to the original 2005-1 were a concern over a run on
AS numbers, which are currently the most constrained Internet Resource
until 4-byte ASN's are a reality, and major concerns over the
possibility of a large increase in the size of the IPv6 default-free
routing table. There were assertions that it was too early for making
multi-homing alone a rationale for a direct assignment of IPv6 address
space, unless it was only for a limited time, until the viability of the
shim6 effort in IETF could be determined. While the current number of
sites who multi-home could easily be accomodated at this time, the
effect of an IPv6 policy has to be looked at over the multiple 10s of
years that IPv6 will need to be functional. Very few people believed
that limited time assignments were viable (i.e. could actually be
reclaimed) and asserted that it would create a similar situation to
IPv4, where early adopters have an unfair advantage. In support of the
proposal, a number of commercial companies, who were attending the
co-located NAv6TF meeting, expressed their unwillingness to invest
resources in deploying IPv6 with Provider Assigned address space, as
they were unwilling to be "locked in" to a provider or else have to
renumber their entire enterprise. When the sense of the room was taken,
the attendees were about evenly split and so there was clearly not a
consensus.

Discussions with those who opposed the advancement of 2005-1 indicated
they were very concerned about almost unlimited access to Provider
Independent IPv6 address assignments. They indicated that it was too
early in the protocol's lifetime to allow unrestricted routing table
growth and expressed the hope that shim6 might still be successful.

There is a real belief that IPv4-like multi-homing will doom the IPv6
routing table to grow beyond a workable size and some other solution
must be found! Many of them expressed an understanding of the large
organization renumbering problem and indicated that they would support a
policy that provided for PI address assignments to a small number of
large organizations for whom the cost of renumbering would be a
significant expense.

So this new version of proposal 2005-1 has been reworked to apply to a
much more limited number of organizations and should not lead to
unrestricted growth of the IPv6 routing table.

Timetable for implementation: immediate