[ppml] 2005-1:Business Need for PI Assignments

[Michael.Dillon at radianz.com]

>   Resources are not allocated based on the fraction of total available
> resources they represent.  They are allocated based on need.

No they aren't. They are allocated based on the rules set down
in policy. And when policies are written, they should take into
consideration the amount of resources available and the impact
on availability of a typical allocation.

>  By your
> proposal, the bigger the storage tank at a given gasoline station, the
> less you should pay per liter for the gas. 

Not at all. By analogy with petrol, the bigger the petroleum reserves
that your policymaking organization (i.e country) has access to,
the less you should pay per litre for petrol. Oh wonder, of wonders!
When I look at the prices of petrol in Canada and in Russia, they 
are considerably cheaper than in the UK. Yes, I have spent some time
in all 3 countries and personally witnessed the prices of petrol.

This is economics, and in the world of IP addressing economics,
it is a fact that the IPv6 reserves are vastly larger than the
IPv4 reserves, and that the impact on those reserves of a /32
allocation is roughly identical. Therefore, the impact of allocating
an IPv6 /32 to an ISP is roughly identical to the impact of allocating
an IPv4 /32 host address to a single interface on a device.

Once again, the lessons learned from IPv4 cannot be blindly applied
to IPv6. We must carefully consider the meaning of those lessons in
a rather different context. Russia and Canada would be foolish to
allow the price of petrol to rise to the levels common in the UK
because they must deal with completely different economic conditons.

In the IPv6 world, we have a vastly larger address space than IPv4
and it is no exaggeration to say that none of us will live long
enough to see this address space exhausted. In IPv6, the concept of
allocating a single /48 to every stub network is quite different
from the IPv4 concept of allocating variable size blocks based on 
need. It's a different address economy and it needs different rules
and policies.

--Michael Dillon