[ppml] IPv6 assignment - proposal for change to nrpm

[michael.dillon at bt.com]

>  In any case, you cannot hold someone 
> to an NDA to cover up criminal actions, it's an illegal 
> contract in that case.  A holder like SBC Global who is under 
> RSA is arguably violating their contract with ARIN by 
> assigning an overage of IP addresses to customers that the 
> customers aren't asking for, in an effort to hoard IPs.

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately
explained by stupidity.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor>

I could have assumed that you had evil intent in this
slur against SBC and other list members, but instead
I applied Hanlon's razor and assumed the other.

> You don't have any proof of threats doing anything because, 
> as you say, ARIN hasn't used threats.  Therefore there is no 
> data as to how wasteful holders would respond to a threat.

There is plenty of data as to how humans react to threat.
If ARIN did resort to threats regarding IPv4 addresses,
many organizations would leave ARIN (flight) and many
others would launch lawsuits (fight). Let's not bother
with an experiment because it wouldn't improve the
situation.

> I should hope that everyone reading, even those with feeble 
> minds, would understand the fundamental basic that you get 
> more flies with honey than vinegar.  In short, IF your going 
> to launch a reclamation effort you START with the Mr. Nice 
> Guy approach.  

And you END with the Mr. Nice Guy approach because the law
of diminishing returns tells you that vinegar ain't worth
the trouble. And as for RAID, that is more likely to harm
your health (and that of your kids) than to reduce the fly
population. Good construction techniques and steel mesh
window screens (not plastic) will keep out more flies than
RAID can kill. 

So what is the ARIN analogy of the window screen? Maybe the
use of IPv6 addresses to ward off the need to deal with IPv4
depletion issues.

> By the time the law of diminishing returns acts on a 
> reclamation effort, the wasteful holders still out there who 
> have so far ignored the nice pleas aren't going to respond to 
> anything other than a threat.

It has already happened. Bill Manning started reclamation about
10 years ago, and at this point, there isn't much left except for
the Defense address ranges but even there, it takes a lot of effort
to get a huge bureaucratic organization to agree to something that
is not threat-related.

> The current RSA contains a threat anyway - you don't pay your 
> bill, you lose you addresses.  Shall we to remove that threat 
> too in the interests of singing kumbiya around the campfire?

Now there is an interesting comment. Because it implies that ARIN
might get some significant aggregate results by mandating that 
RSA signers all do internal audits and report back to ARIN. Right
now the responsibility for IP addressing in most companies is spread
out and scattered. There is no single point of authority in the senior
management team (or thereabouts). If ARIN required RSA signers to do
a serious addressing audit signed off by the CFO of the company, that
would shake things up a bit.

In fact, such an audit requirement would probably extend the lifetime
of IPv4 at least a few more months by shaking loose a lot of available
addresses within a company. 

--Michael Dillon