[ppml] Revised Policy Proposal Resource Reclamation

[Stephen Sprunk]

Thus spake "Leo Bicknell" <bicknell at ufp.org>
> In a message written on Mon, Apr 30, 2007 at 01:26:25PM -0700, Owen DeLong 
> wrote:
>>   4.  If the review shows that existing usage is substantially
>>   not in  compliance with current allocation and/or assignment
>>   policies, the organization shall return resources as required
>>   to bring them into compliance.
>
> I'm going to raise the objection I think staff will raise, what is
> "substantially not in compliance"?
...
> Utilization is sticker, and I suggest it needs to be a high and
> low watermark sort of arrangement.  Right now (for ISP's) the
> numbers are you get a 6 month supply, and you need 80% for
> more space.  So what if you get a six month supply and then
> your business experiences some issue so that a year later
> you're only at 60% utilization?  Is that "substantially not in
> compliance"?

That's close enough to compliant for me.  In such a case, they'd probably 
manage to hit 80% before the grace period was over anyways, making 
revocation moot.  At most ARIN could take a quarter of their space, and 
they'd get it back in a few months.  It just wouldn't make sense to bother.

As a hypothetical example, say IPv4 exhaustion comes and in response we pass 
a policy saying that NAT is now mandatory for all customers and any 
assignment larger than a /32 has to be justified.  We would expect ARIN to 
initiate a review of anyone with more than a minimum-size allocation.  If 
you were still issuing /24s to every customer regardless of need, as many 
ISPs do today, they'd whack you over the head and give you 6 months (or a 
longer, reasonable period if requested) to clean up your act.

More likely, say we eventually decide -- and counsel agrees -- that policy 
applies to folks with legacy assignments.  ARIN would then review everyone 
with such and apply the "if you applied for space today, what would we give 
you" standard.  If the org had significantly more than that amount, e.g. 
certain universities with a /8 who only really need a /14 or so, they'd get 
whacked.  Ditto for any org whose space doesn't show up in the global 
routing table and who doesn't respond to all reasonable attempts by ARIN to 
contact them; the presumption would be the space is no longer in use, not 
compliant with current policy, and could be reclaimed.

There's a lot of low-hanging fruit out there, even under existing policy. 
If we ever get to the point an evil ARIN is descending on ISPs every year 
and auditing them like the IRS, Owen and I will be first in line to propose 
taking this policy back.  However, my impressions are that the staff finds 
that idea as distasteful as we do and that they aren't interested in 
revocations unless a given situation is so obviously b0rked that their 
conscience leaves them no choice.

We're not out to get people who are acting in good faith and getting 
reasonably close to the target that current policy specifies, even if they 
make mistakes along the way.

> I do support the concept of the policy, and I think what you've
> put together is pretty reasonable.

Thanks.

S

Stephen Sprunk      "Those people who think they know everything
CCIE #3723         are a great annoyance to those of us who do."
K5SSS                                             --Isaac Asimov