[ppml] Policy 2002-5

[Michael.Dillon at radianz.com]

>Hi Everyone,
>On the same vein, how do we feel about this rewording?  Also, I again 
feel
>that 12 months is way too long a time, especially if the organization is
>already not using a part of the space.

I think that we should set aside this issue until it can be more clearly 
formulated and discussed. One issue that I see is that this is trying to 
do two different things and I believe that we need two more focused 
policies to accomplish that. Firstly, we want to contact all legacy users 
of IPv4 space and get them to become part of the system, i.e. keep in 
touch and register their up to date contact information. Secondly, we want 
to organize the pre-ARIN IPv4 space in a more logical manner because we 
can probably achieve a higher usage rate by doing so. And maybe thirdly, 
we want legacy users to pay for service. At a minimum there is the 
in-addr.arpa service, but a case can be made for part of the routability 
attribute being provided by being legitimately registered with ARIN.

Therefore, let's drop the specific proposal 2002-5 and let's begin to 
discuss how we can better address its contents in a more focused and 
coordinated way.

I would suggest that there be a program to contact all holders of legacy 
IPv4 space and that we should tell them that they MUST register their 
contact information with their RIR or else relinquish their allocation. 
This is not a hardship for any address space holder. Some organizations 
may claim that their use of the space is outside of the public Internet 
and therefore they should be left alone, however I disagree. They should 
still at minimum register their contact info and the status of the space. 
Whether or not they should legitimately continue to be given exclusive 
usage rights to the space is something that we should not be dealing with 
at all right now. We just need to know who has the usage rights to every 
single fragment of the IPv4 space.

If, in fact, we are going to reorganize the layout of the legacy 
allocations such as the swamp, then I believe that we need more discussion 
and some joint action with the other RIRs. Any policy relating to this 
should be identically worded with all RIRs. I believe that it is a good 
idea to swap space only if the result is a less chaotic map of the IPv4 
space at the level of RIR allocations to members. What I mean is that 
today we know that in certain ranges, the RIR allocated all blocks at /19 
or larger. In other ranges the RIRs allocated at /20 or larger. If we can 
reorganize the swamp so that there are defined ranges in which all 
allocations are /21 or larger, /22 or larger, /23 or larger and /24 or 
larger then this would be a good thing. But we won't really know how big 
to make these ranges until we have an idea of who has legacy usage rights 
and still wishes to retain those rights. Also, once we decide to 
reorganize the space through swapping, we should have at least a rough 
plan for offering new allocations with the same sizes. And perhaps we 
should even be issuing smaller blocks than /24 in a defined range for 
small multihomed networks.

And then there is payment for service which is an issue that strikes at 
the heart of what a registry is and what it does. Here, I believe we need 
a vision that goes beyond matters such as swamp cleaning in the IPv4 space 
but also encompasses the future when IPv6 is so widely deployed that we 
have decided to abandon the IPv4 space entirely. People will still be 
using IPv4 for lots of things but we won't have any need for a global 
registry for IPv4 anymore.

At that time, I still see some value in having RIRs and I see that there 
are services for which fees should be paid. ARIN will still be the 
maintainer of the single authoritative database that identifies the 
organization which has legitimate rights of use for any specific IP 
address. For various reasons, I feel that ARIN should be flexing its 
muscle a little more in this area. One thing that I believe ARIN should do 
is to provide a new form of routing registry which identifies who has the 
usage rights to every block and which references any local routing 
registry which that rights holder may be operating. It should be possible 
for every network operator to verify their incoming route announcements by 
querying such a registry either in realtime or by mirroring the database. 
Whether or not anyone does in fact do such validation is not important nor 
is it important whether or not they trust ARIN well enough to hook the 
registry directly to their routers. The important issue here is that ARIN 
should make an authoritative database available for queries and mirroring 
and that ARIN should enforce this database by removing the data when an 
organization is no longer in good standing. 

In any case, it would be nice if you all would change the subject lines of 
any replies to this message because there are really 4 separate threads 
that could be started from these suggestions. Thanks.

-- Michael Dillon