[ppml] FW: No transfer policies are needed

[michael.dillon at bt.com]

>> My biggest question to anyone who will answer at this point 
>> is; "why do we need a transfer policy?" 

> 2.  If hardship occurs because space is not readily available 
> through ARIN for its service area, and ARIN has done 
> nothing..extraordinary toward relieving that hardship, then 
> it will be seem by those who wish its demise to have 
> abdicated its stewardship responsibilities and will become 
> fodder for propaganda against the current Internet governance model.

When the IPv4 free address pool is exhausted, i.e. fully allocated to
organizations who NEED those addresses to USE them in the network,
it seems highly unlikely that there will be any significant number
of UNUSED IPv4 addresses anywhere. The fundamental reason that the
free pool is exhausted is that the network has grown so large that
all those addresses are needed for operations. People like to point
to some of the early /8 allocations as wasteful, but there is no
evidence to support this. Many organizations who were not using their
original /8 or /16 allocations, have returned them to the free pool.
Chances are that most of the remaining allocations actually are in
use and that those organizations have designed a network which does
not use Port-NAT because they built their networks before Port-NAT
existed.

All the people who have actually crunched some numbers over recovery
of /8s and /16s, come up with just a few months of extra time until
IPv4 exhaustion. This is the pool of addresses that would theoretically
be transferred under some form of transfer policy. It seems rather silly
to put so much effort into something with such small addressing impact.

> And, this appears to..and may in fact... be bad for 
> emerging areas of the Internet, as address resources are 
> transferred from poorer areas to those with cash.

Paradoxically, in addition to harming the people who are
unable to buy addresses, the transfer policy HARMS the organizations
who succeed in buying addresses because they lose large sums of
money which reduces their ability to move to IPv6. 

> 2.  It appears to reward large legacy holders who squatted on 
> resources that others in the industry need.  ARIN's actions 
> in supporting a transfer policy that recognizes if not 
> actively accounts for the 'selling' of address resources 
> seems to sanction this activity.

To date, I believe only one AC or BoT member has disclosed their
financial interests in organizations holding legacy allocations.
This places suspicion on everything that ARIN does. Every single
AC and BoT member should make this disclosure and it should be
placed on the ARIN website where we can easily see who, if anyone,
stands to benefit personally from a transfer policy.

> 3.  ARIN should begin a program of awareness and education 
> aim at impediment identification and mitigation.  This 
> program designed to touch all constituencies of the Internet 
> industry and helping to facilitate the smooth and riskless 
> transition to IPv6.

Yes, yes, yes.
http://www.getipv6.info is only a start.
For one thing, a lot of people are parroting the opinion that IPv6
is not yet ready and therefore they are not going to implement it.
However, this begs the question, specifically what is not ready?
We need to encourage people to file bug reports on IPv6 so that
things can be fixed. Perhaps ARIN could solicit specific bug reports
and operate some kind of issue tracking system for these. 

--Michael Dillon