[ppml] Policy Proposal: Expand timeframe of Additional Requests

[michael.dillon at bt.com]

> There _is_ policy that allows return; the problem is the fee 
> schedule.  The
> 73 orgs that fit in the "X-large" category have absolutely no 
> financial incentive to return space because they pay a 
> constant amount until they get down to a /14, 

Believe me, there is nothing that can be done to the fee schedule to
give large organizations an incentive for returning IPv4. We pay $18,000
per year now. Even if it were double that, we still consider it to be a
pittance in the overall corporate scheme of things.

It would be a far greater incentive if we could somehow gain glory as a
good corporate citizen by returning our IPv4 addresses as soon as they
were no longer needed. Glory is something that you can take to the bank
via your sales force using it to clinch major deals worth hundreds of
millions, maybe billions.

Just consider that in order to be able to return IPv4 addresses, an
organization needs to first migrate some infrastructure to IPv6, second
launch IPv6 products, third convert some IPv4 customers to the IPv6
products and 4th have good enough records to KNOW that the IPv4 address
range is no longer needed. The act of returning those addresses
broadcasts to everyone, how competent the organization is in all those
areas, and how futureproof their services are.

> (There's also the lesser issue that end users with direct 
> assignments pay $100/yr regardless of how much space they 
> have, or $0/yr if they're legacy-only, so there is absolutely 
> zero incentive for them to return anything if they deploy v6 
> because their fees won't change.  We don't need _another_ 
> flamefest about legacy holders, though, so let's stick to 
> LIRs for the moment.)

Leaving aside that ARIN fees are NOT a matter of public policy and
really should not be discussed on PPML, but on the ARIN-DISCUSS list, I
think that the question of incentives to return IPv4 addresses is not
nearly as simple as money issues.

There was a little bit of dicsussion a while ago about the idea of
requiring all new IPv4 allocation requests to contain the answers to a
survey about IPv6 deployment within the organization. That survey was
supposed to require the IP address management folks in or near the
engineering department, to get the finance and regulatory and CTO type
people involved in providing the answers. This creates a real incentive
to deploy IPv6 because all those people will begin asking questions
about their current strategies. They will all realize that IPv4
exhaustion could begin to bite them in as little as two years if RIR
policies become more draconian. It's a question of identifying and
quantifying risks associated with various strategies and realizing that
IPv6 deployment helps to reduce risks.

This doesn't incent returning IPv4 addresses, but it does incent IPv6
deployment.

--Michael Dillon