Policy Proposal 2002-3

[Mailing List]

The micro allocation of /21 /24 to multihome should be implemented for the
following reasons:

1. The policy of qualify for ARIN's minimum allocation requirement or
receive IP's from your upstream provider has a direct correlation with the
size of a company. Generally a company that uses  /20 IP allocation, has a
larger network and customer base, therefore they would be considered in the
category of large size companies. This policy currently discriminates, puts
a small business at a disadvantage and promotes and helps to monopolize
large ISP's and upstream providers.

2. Currently, many ISP's and upstream providers are in bankruptcy and/or
have gone out of business; therefore, getting IP's from upstream providers
is no longer a good solution since small businesses will have the
disadvantage of returning and re-numbering their IP's.

3. Once a small business obtains IP addresses from their upstream providers,
upstream providers are able to hold that small business "hostage" and
increase their rate without any consequences, because the level of
difficulty to move to another upstream provider could put the small company
out of business.

4. The global routing table and its minimum allocation requirement must be
investigated by several third party technology companies, who are
non-partial and do not benefit from ARIN's decision in any way. They could
determine what is the best minimum requirement in order for the Internet to
run at its optimum and without any routing table problems.

5. ARIN's current policy of the minimum requirement of /20 addresses
promotes IP usage and reduces the ability to conserve IPs, such as virtual
hosting, for web sites. Companies now have to come up with wasteful uses for
IPs that they don't really need, just to qualify for the current policy
minimum.

6. ARIN's current policy automatically qualifies a multihome organization to
obtain an AS number. There isn't any minimum IP requirement to obtain AS
numbers and AS numbers have the direct effect of increasing the global routi
ng table.

7. Regarding the global routing table issue, memory is very inexpensive now,
and Cisco is introducing new router models with a larger D-RAM size, that
are reasonably priced and affordable by small businesses.

8. Theoretically, there are 4 billion IPv4 addresses available.  Out of
that, only a small fraction of them (Approx. 100 million) are being used and
approx. 2.3 billion are being allocated. This makes the current minimum
allocation policy not practical. Large organizations are sitting on an
exorbitant amount of IP addresses that they are not using and/or not capable
of ever being used. As an example, there is a company that owns
approximately 7 million IP addresses and has roughly 153,000 employees
(employees as of Nov, 1999). How do they justify for receiving such large IP
space, when a small business is not allocated any IP space.