[arin-ppml] Some observations on the differences in the various transfer policy proposals

[David Williamson]

On Sun, Oct 19, 2008 at 06:47:46PM -0700, Scott Leibrand wrote:
> Or, to put a more practical face on the same question: how do you propose 
> that the industry deal with the deaggregation that will result from the 
> widespread transfer of small netblocks (as allowed under prop-50)?
> 
> I agree that restricting deaggregation through regulating access to the 
> registry will not be 100% effective, but it seems more likely to be 
> effective than any alternative I've seen so far.

I know many or even most of us wear multiple hats, and routing table
bloat is a very serious concern for us.  Depsite that, I'm still
wondering why we spend so much time trying to prevent it via address
policy.  We've been only marginally effective at it, as Geoff notes.

It seems to me that the ability of a given allocation or assignment to
get into a global routing table (whatever that may mean at the time) is
entirely not our (ARIN's or other RIR's) problem.  As the ARIN NRPM
notes:

>Provider independent (portable) addresses issued directly from ARIN or
>other Regional Registries are not guaranteed to be globally routable.
>Therefore, ISPs should consider the following order of priority when
>requesting IP address space:
>
>    * Request IP address space from upstream provider
>    * Request IP address space from provider's provider
>    * Request IP address space from ARIN (not guaranteed to be globally routable)

The language is a bit outdated, but the intent is clear.

>From my point of view, good stewardship of the address space means
conservation and efficiency.  That's almost diametrically opposed to
preserving the routing table...but again, that's not ARIN's problem.
It's a problem for the operator community to sort out, via new
technology (RRG folks, save us, please!), or monetization of routing
slots, or value judgements about specific routes (if a root server was
anycast in a /28, would you route it?).

Again, many of us live in both worlds, so it's difficult to separate
those conflicting needs, but we need to at least acknowledge the
problem.  More on topic, I do think we need to consider Geoff's point
about what regulatory role we see for the RIR system in the future.
I'm not convinced that abstaining from any regulation is a good idea,
since we do have a bit of a lever to yank on, but heavy-handed
regulation will almost certainly result in alternative registries
getting setup.  While alternative roots for DNS are mostly an amusing
and harmless joke (to me, at least), alternative authorities for who
uses what IPv4 space seems like a path to chaos.

For my part, I think the level of regulation imposed by the current
*allocation* policies is sufficient.  Adding extra verbiage to a
transfer policy may only cause confusion.

Perhaps we could see a copy of the open mic slide from rs posted here?
That seemed like a more rational way to move forward with a transfer
policy.

-David