[ppml] back to the IPv6 Policy questions

[David Kessens]

Thomas,

On Thu, Jan 09, 2003 at 05:12:46PM -0500, Thomas Narten wrote:
> 
> > The second issue that I see is midsize businesses (I purposely don't
> > define what midsize actually is) who really would like to have
> > numberportability and who actually deserve it (in my opinion :-)).
> 
> I have a hard time with this statement. Why do "midsize business X"
> "deserve" portable addresses when "non-midsize business Y" do not?
> This is a non-technical justification.

This is a policy group and our goal for a policy should be to get ip
as widely deployed as possible with minimal cost and without breaking
the very technology that one wants to deploy.

Renumbering two hosts, updating a few DNS records etc. is fairly easy
to do and thus not very expensive - things really start to become
complicated (=expensive) when networks grow in size and especially if
network planning was done poorly.

Organizations are going to compare the cost of renumbering versus the
cost of qualifying for portable ip address from ARIN and the
routability of the addresses received from ARIN (whether it is v6 or
v4). An organization doesn't need to become very big before the cost
of renumbering is exceeding their cost for getting addresses from
ARIN. It's no surprise that organizations in such a situation view our
policies as overly restrictive and ask for change, whether this might
cause technical problems or not.

> The current policy isn't just about doing what we would *like* to
> do. It's also very much about doing something that won't cause major
> problems down the road when, say, there are a million "midsize
> businesses" with their own perhaps not-so-portable-anymore space.

You give two of the important reasons why this is not an easy problem
to solve. However, claiming that the problem doesn't exist because you
and me don't have a solution for it right now doesn't make the problem
go away. 

David K.
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