[ppml] Policy Proposal: IPv4 Soft Landing

[michael.dillon at bt.com]

> I think having a policy that says that after certain time (in 
> fact I'd prefer it to be specified as a year rather then IPv4 
> depletion thereshold), ISPs MUST demonstrate availability of 
> IPv6 infrastructure before getting new ipv4 space is in fact 
> good for IPv6 deployment and its production use which is 
> ultimate goal here.

I would prefer to see a new policy that says effective immediately, all
applications for assignments or allocations must include the answers to
a set of questions about the organization's preparations for IPv6. This
is not an arduous requirement because it doesn't force the applicant to
do anything more than research information internally and report it to
ARIN. This is the kind of thing that the contacts already do. But it
does raise the awareness of IPv6 inside these organizations because the
questions are being asked.

I haven't specified the exact questions because this is not a formal
proposal. But I would think that they should be the type of questions
that are meaningful for reporting statistics about IPv6 planning.
Ideally, the author of the questions would seek some assistance from a
university department (sociology, economics) to help structure the
questions so that the statistics can detect movement through stages
getting closer to a fully-functional network service.

These types of statistics would be invaluable to show us the true state
of IPv6 activity in North America. It may not be as far away as you
think. And the very fact that we collect and publish such statistics
helps raise public awareness of the address exhaustion issue without
mandating any particular action. Through increased awareness we will get
a better sense of what actions the industry would support ARIN in.

And we should be able to do all of this independent of the other RIRs.
The fact that there is a particular set of statistics being collected by
all RIRs in a coordinated way, does not preclude ARIN from collecting or
publishing some of its own stats. I made a suggestion that ARIN should
provide regular (maybe monthly) reports of the IPv6 uptake among orgs
with IPv4 allocations and assignments. That got rejected because it was
too hard to coordinate with RIPE et al. which is irrelevant since I
suggested that ARIN do this to shed some light on the North American
situation.

--Michael Dillon