[arin-discuss] Good Stewardship by example, I'd like to RETURN a /20

[Keith W. Hare]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: arin-discuss-bounces at arin.net 
> [mailto:arin-discuss-bounces at arin.net] On Behalf Of Lee Howard
> Sent: Friday, July 24, 2009 10:07 AM
> 
>... 
> In order to fulfill my duties as a Board member, I am asking 
> the membership 
> for guidance in setting the budget and fees.  
> ...

My opinion is that ARIN should not spend any additional money attempting to convince legacy (or non legacy) resource holders to consolidate and return IPv4 address space. My reasons for this opinion are:

1. The agreements related to pre-ARIN address assignments are murky and would require a fair amount of legal effort and time to force an organization to return address space.

2. Social pressure is unlikely to be effective because this is a complex issue not easily explained in a sound-bite.

3. Even if an organization decides for whatever reason that it is a good idea to return a /8, it is likely to take a fair amount of time to renumber out of the /8 and return it. 

So, I don't expect enough IPv4 address space to be returned quickly enough to make a significant difference.

ARIN efforts and budget are better spent doing whatever it can to convince equipment vendors, network vendors, and end users to push towards IPv6.

>... 
> Is there anything we (the ARIN community) can do to help?  
> Probably a better
> topic for ARIN-PPML.

At this point, the only policy related action that might help would be to allow smaller organizations to get Provider Independent IPv6 address space. This has the risk of increasing the size of the global routing tables, but it would also increase the size of the IPv6 equipment market and put more pressure on upstream providers to support IPv6.

Right now, I can find only a small amount of router/firewall equipment in my size range that supports IPv6, but that doesn't really matter because I can't get IPv6 address space from my upstream or from ARIN.

>From where I sit, it looks like the IPv6 equipment and upstream support does not exist because there is no market demand, and there is no market demand because the IPv6 equipment and upstream support does not exist. Whatever ARIN can do to disrupt this cycle will help.

Keith Hare
JCC Consulting, Inc.