[ppml] Proposed Policy: Changes to IPv6 initial allocationcriteria

[Stephen Sprunk]

Thus spake "Andrew Dul" <andrew.dul at quark.net>
>>  Policy statement:
>>
>>  Delete section 6.5.1.1 d. of NRPM
>>
>> d:  be an existing, known ISP in the ARIN region or have a plan for
>> making at least 200 /48 assignments to other organizations within 
>> five
>> years.
>
> My main understanding of why this policy might be needed is that
> some feel that the 200 /48 assignments is an arbitrary requirement.
> Some feel that this type of requirement would encourage a smaller
> LIR to provide false information to ARIN in order to obtain PA address
> space.
>
> If the problem is with the 200 /48 requirements, I would suggest just
> striking the words "at least 200" from the policy rather than removing
> the entire requirement.

The requirement, as I understand it, is to prevent allocations to "flash 
in the pan" startups who have no track record or orgs who are not really 
LIRs from getting a routing table slot; the latter was a major concern 
before the PI policy was adopted (e.g. WTF did Cisco, IBM, et al qualify 
as LIRs and get /32s?).

A lot of this hinges on the ARIN staff's interpretation of "have a 
plan".  I would hope that any startup ISP with a reasonable business 
model would be accepted as "having a plan", and virtually no ISP is 
going to be economically viable without at least 200 customers.  There 
may be some specialized orgs that cater to specific niches which might 
be under 200 users, but those would likely qualify under the "known ISP" 
category, or their customers may be large enough to get PI space now 
anyways.

The other thing is that a small ISP is most likely to start up as a PA 
customer of another ISP; asking them to accumulate N customers before 
getting their own routing table slot seems reasonable, though there's 
room for debate on what N should be.

I'd like to see stats on how many ISPs have been _denied_ an allocation 
under the existing rules, and why.  I'd also be curious if ARIN's 
counsel has any comments on the anti-trust implications mentioned in the 
rationale.  If neither of those turns up a motivation for change, I'm 
against this proposal by default on the grounds it's a solution in 
search of a problem.

> I do not think that small ISPs should use the PI address space policy
> to a bootstrap to getting PA address space later.

Agreed; I'd rather have LIRs lying about their customer counts to get PA 
space than have them using PI space, which is specifically intended for 
direct assignment to end users.

S

Stephen Sprunk         "God does not play dice."  --Albert Einstein
CCIE #3723         "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the
K5SSS        dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking