[ppml] Get you IPv6 Today, lets update the policy

[Thomas Narten]

Phil Howard <phil-arin-ppml at ipal.net> writes:

> | > So the first barrier is that you must be a ARIN customer
> | 
> | This is not the case.  In the ARIN region you do not first have to be a
> | customer of the RIR to request Internet addressing resources.

> What's not clear is whether the address space I might be able to get
> will be the permanent space.

What space is permanent? No IPv6 space is "permanent" in the sense
that you will be guaranteed to always have it and that it will always
be routable. If you are an endsite, your ISP might fold and the
addresses might stop working. You might change ISPs and renumber (over
a period of months), etc. Even if you are an ISP, at some point other
ISPs might decide that the routing tables have become too large and
unmanagable and that your prefix is too small to be worth
carrying. One hopes these things don't happen, but some of them no
doubt will at some time.

> I'm really not interested in that level of "experimentation".  I'd
> rather be doing in in "learning mode" instead of "research mode".
> I want to make the commitment to move forward, and do what I can to
> make it happen.  But that won't happen for me with 6bone.

Actually, if you read the 6bone is all about, "learning" is one of the
things it is supposed to foster. www.6bone.net.

> The kind of services I focus on now don't justify it.  But I still need
> portable space.  The problem is there is still discontinuity in what
> much of IPv6 is supposed to be about (at least as I saw it) and what
> ARIN policy is.

You say something key above. You want portable space. There is no such
thing in IPv6 (and arguably, not even in IPv4). What you can get is
space that is routable, today. Whether it will continue to be routable
forever, depends on a lot of things, like  growth of the routing
tables. We simply do not have a technology  that allows  everyone to
get a "portable" address that will work forever.

What the current allocation policies are set up to do today is:

 - allow real ISPs to get address space, but in such a way that as
   they grow (i.e, allocate more addresses to end sites and
   downstreams), the size of the allocation they have from the RIR
   also grows, i.e., from a /29 to /27 to /26, etc. This is to
   minimize fragmentation of the address space as IPv6 usage grows,
   and maximize the potential for continued aggregation.

 - not make it possible for a non-ISP and typical end sites to get
   addresses directly from RIRs; they should get addresses from their
   ISPs. This is to scale the system over time, as we know that having
   end sites go directly to RIRs for address is unscalable and will
   result in a routing mess.
   
Thomas