[ppml] Policy Proposal 2002-3: Micro-Assignments forMultihomed Networks

[Leo Bicknell]

In a message written on Fri, Aug 22, 2003 at 09:58:33AM -0600, Alec H. Peterson wrote:
> The fact remains that ARIN serves diverse constituencies.  I encourage you 
> to read Bill Darte's recent post, I think it strikes a very reasonable 
> compromise, by proposing to immediately lower the minimum allocation to a 
> /22, with a timetable for further reductions in the minimum allocation size 
> based on the change in routing table growth.

Respectfully, the problem is that ARIN does not yet serve the
constituency that needs this proposal, and those it does serve today
in general have incentives to act in the opposite manor.

The people who need these small blocks today can't get them from
ARIN, and are not ARIN members.  They don't get to vote.  Insted,
they get their addresses from an upstream provider that has direct
incentives (from charging a fee for address allocations to wanting
the customer to be in their own non-portable space to make it more
painful for the customer to leave) to prevent proposals like this
from succeeding.  They are the ones who get to vote.  It also seems
to be futher hampered by the fact that only a small group of ISP's
go to the meeting and raise their voice, often for better or worse
making it the loudest one by default.

To address the proposal itself, I'm happy to start with a /22 and
move to a /24 limit as necessary.  The problem is that the proposal
wants to tie that to routing table growth.  Since ARIN doesn't
control the size of the routing table, that should be a non-starter.
More to the point, it does not put any objective measure on the
routing table impact -- which due to my beliefs from the previous
paragraph will mean an increase by so much as 1 route will be used
to argue against it in the future.  There is a hidden implication
the routing table size should stay the same, or decrease.  That's
bogus.  It will clearly increase in the short term (as people
renumber they will have to announce both in many cases), and it
should have a long term impact to increase the routing table (as
it becomes easier for people to set up their redundnat networks the
way they should be set up).  It also doesn't supply a measurement
interval that's meaningful, during the time proposed we'll still
be in the initial cut over period, with the double announcements
and the like.  That's not a good time to judge success or failure.

It is up to ARIN to give ISP's and large end users the IP space
they need.  Period.  The measure of success is that the people who
need IP's can get them with a reasonable amount of effort, in a
reasonable amount of time.

The issue of routing table size should not be in any of ARIN's
proposals, just like issues of which ISP's filter which routes
should not be in them either.  The routing table size question is
great in some other forms, and answers to it may influence how
ARIN's members vote on some proposals, but it has no business being
in a proposal.

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request at tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org
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