[arin-ppml] Policy Proposal: Open Access To IPv6

[Garry Dolley]

On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 12:02:27PM -0700, Matthew Kaufman wrote:
> michael.dillon at bt.com wrote:
>>>  A multihoming requirement discriminates against networks that either 
>>> cannot or do not want to multihome.
>>>     
>>
>> Not if you use something like the wording I suggested where you explicitly 
>> say that all ISPs are assumed
>> to qualify.
>>
>> The point is that we don't want to give /32 to just anyone. 
>
> Why? Either there's enough that doing that has no risk of ever running out, 
> or there aren't enough, in which case *all* the existing policies are too 
> liberal.
>
> If your argument is routing table size, that's a separate problem that 
> isn't ARIN's problem.
>
> Back in the (actually not so) early IPv4 days, I got an IPv4 /24 for my 
> house. My friends and I learned a whole lot about setting up IP networks 
> using our real-world address. Didn't cost us a cent, and many of us have 
> gone on to do more interesting things in the Internet world.
>
> Today, if my kids wanted to get a real IPv6 /32 to play with, they'd have 
> to pay a bunch of money and fill out a bunch of paperwork. So they won't be 
> doing that. Even though there's plenty of IPv6 space for everyone on the 
> planet to play.
>
> Either we want to encourage adoption or we want to keep this as tightly 
> controlled as IPv4 has become. The former seems like a better idea, given 
> how IPv4 is going.

The reason is, with IPv6, we're trying to come up with a more
predictable way of allocating blocks to different organizations [1]
[2].  In IPv4, it was roughly "as much space as you could justify".
This caused a lot of networks to get several dis-continuguous
blocks, first some small ones, then bigger ones.  This causes
problems with aggregation / summarization.

Currently, it is generally accepted that /32's are for organizations
that will assign /48's to further downstream organizations.  Those
that don't do this can be satisfied by just one /48.  There are
plenty of subnets available in a /48 to "play with" and learn all
kinds of things.

1. RFC 5375, "IPv6 Unicast Address Assignment Considerations"
2. RFC 3177, "IAB/IESG Recommendations on IPv6 Address Allocations to Sites"

-- 
Garry Dolley
ARP Networks, Inc. | http://www.arpnetworks.com | (818) 206-0181
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