[ppml] Increase the flexibility of IP allocations to facilitate planning

[Michael.Dillon at radianz.com]

>Many of us have complained about those not following the RFC-
>I forget the # at the moment- with concerns towards postmaster, abuse 
etc.
>and I personally have been told by an ISP, that "we do not SWIP" blocks.

>If we are going to increase the flex here, should we not see if they are 
>following the basic policies first? 

I don't agree. I think a major reason why people aren't following the 
existing rules is that they are too rigid. It would be a mistake to apply 
pressure to follow the existing policy because it could end up breaking 
the entire RIR structure. It is a significant benefit to the IP network 
operator industry to have this membership-based RIR structure instead of 
the webwork of government bureacracies (FCC, PUCs) that the telephone 
industry has to deal with. We need to make this structure work, not break 
it.

A wiser course of action would be to rationalise the whole set of ARIN 
policies to make them into something that members can comply with. 

>1. Does the user have complaints about violation of ARIN IPv4 policies?

As far as I know we have no policing functions in the RIRs, or IANA or 
ICANN. Also, IANA is barely functional at this point in time and that's 
the only point of appeal specified in policy. Instead of complaining about 
policy violators, people simply adopt the same behavior as the policy 
violators.

>2. Can we do an actual spot check to see if the user is following the 
policies?

If member organizations have such a hard time tracking their own IP 
address inventory, what hope do we have of imposing an external audit 
requirement?

>3. Is there whois data actually correct?

Let's go back one step further. Is there any reason at all for publishing 
whois data? What is the purpose of whois data? If the reason for doing 
this was clearer and there was a clearly identified purpose for each bit 
of whois data, then people would take more care to publish it correctly. I 
believe that we can best cleanse the whois data by getting rid of most of 
it because it serves no purpose. It originated as a list of people using 
the resources provided by the DARPA's "Internet" project back in the days 
before PC's when everyone used timesharing systems. From that time to 
this, nobody has really taken a hard look at what is the point of this 
whole thing.

--Michael Dillon