[arin-ppml] Proposal 98: Last Minute Assistance for Small ISPs

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

Leo Bicknell wrote:
> In a message written on Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 10:29:49AM -0500, Bill Darte wrote:
>> minimum becomes /23 and remains so.  The purpose is to allow ISPs who
>> have never been able to qualify for /20 allocations, to qualify under
>> this policy for small blocks of address space.
> 
> This is the part of the proposal that has me the most confused.  It
> seems to purposely target ISPs who do not interact with ARIN today
> and attempt to make them deal with ARIN at the last minute. 

Essentially correct.  The problem is that these ISP currently do NOT
interface with ARIN today BUT WANT TO.

> I find
> it likely most of these ISP's, given their modest needs, would only
> get a single allocation of IPv4 resources from ARIN, ever.
> 

Also correct.

> I'm not quite sure I see how it is of assistance to these extra
> small ISP's to make them jump through a hoop they are not familiar
> with at all in order to receive a one-time, very small allocation
> of IPv4 resources.
> 

I will leave it to the small ISP's to let you know how much of
assistance it would be.

> I would find it extremely helpful if someone could provide two or
> three plausable scenarios where this policy would cause a benefit
> greater than the work it introduces.
> 

There's a huge, and in my ever so humble opinion, well founded, fear
among the small ISP's that when IPv4 runout happens, the LIR's they
are getting their IPv4 allocations from are going, to put it bluntly,
bend them over the table and completely screw them over.

Think about it for a minute.  Suppose a big ISP like, say, Jono-gent, 
were to have this large, luscious /18 that they got from an acquisition,
and they have, as is customary for them due to their horribly awful
tracking, been paying very little attention to.  Over the years as
customers have disconnected, or gone to translation, large sections of
this /18 have become abandoned.

SO, 6 months after IPv4 runout, this hytra-headed transfer market
that we have allowed through "emergency action" of the Board to
come into existence, has put a market price of a million bucks
on that /18

Jono-gent, strapped for cash, sees these wild prices and thinks, Hey,
I can clean up my IPv4 allocations and sell off some of them.

This is, after all, behavior that we WANT to happen, that we are
HOPING the transfer market will provoke.

So, SmallCo ISP gets a letter from Jono-gent saying that first, they
must vacate that /24 that they have their nameservers on (with 2000
domains on) in 90 days, and second, that the new /24 that Jono-gent
is going to renumber them into is going to have just a -slight- price
increase, nothing that a few extra thousand bucks a year won't cover.

Well, I can assure you that I have heard from some small ISP's who
are afraid of such a scenario.  They want to get their own IPv4 block
NOW.  They are MORE than willing to jump into IPv6, but their
admins cannot justify spending a lot of money on direct IPv6 assignments
(not to mention that Jono-gent isn't even running IPv6 natively yet)
when they are spending a few thousand bucks a year with Jono-gent on
a /24

If we allow them to climb into the ship with ARIN before the train
wreck, then they can get both IPv4 and IPv6 for the same price, and
then start working on their IPv6 deployments with tunnel brokers
or whatever.

They know they will never get another IPv4 block, not just because
of being small, but because once the transfer market is in full
swing, prices on that will be out of their league.

And, frankly, the sad truth is that the vast majority of these
small ISP's won't be coming to ARIN for help until that day 3-4
years from now that they get their own Jono-gent letter ordering
them to be renumbered - and will be screwed.  It will be bad enough
to tell them "Sorry, but you guys HAD your chance a few years ago
to get a small allocation and you were asleep at the stick"  I
don't want to be the one telling the ones who WEREN'T asleep at
the stick, and are asking for a small block NOW, that we won't
help them.  Do you?

Ted