[arin-ppml] Policy Proposal 110: Preservation of minimal IPv4 Resources for New and Small Organizations and for IPv6 Transition

[michael.dillon at bt.com]

> We should consider the cost of failure, of being wrong, that 
> the ipv6 soup is stone soup with just the stone.

Quite a low risk of that considering how widely deployed IPv6 is
currently, carrying the same level of traffic as the entire IPv4
Internet in 1999.

> I dont believe it is defensible to stand up and say that we 
> knew this was coming and we still could not agree to spare a 
> bit of space to try and protect those likely to be most vulnerable.

In another thread it was clear that it is possible to set up
IPv6 only services with a little bit of help from DNS service
providers and email service providers that already have IPv4
addresses.

> What you might call tough love may be interpreted quite 
> differently by others.

Everything is interpreted differently by other people.

I have yet to see a concrete example of a scenario in which
ARIN could make things better by giving out small amounts of
IPv4 address space, after everyone else has been FORCED into
IPv6 deployment by IPv4 exhaustion. 

It is too late to do this kind of thing. IPv4 exhaustion will
happen in your next fiscal year. There could be a run on addresses
at any moment that would pull that date closer to us by several
months. Even passing this policy proposal would pull the date closer.

When the police order people out of a hurricane strike zone, ahead
of landfall, they are willfully damaging small businesses that
might be able to continue operating during the hurricane. They
do this on two counts, first by forcing the owners and staff
to evacuate, and secondly by forcing their potential customers
to evacuate. Nobody seriously takes the police to task for
being unfair to small business while the Macdonalds' restaurants
away from the landfall zone do extra business.

This is a similar situation. The global IPv4 address supply 
HAS RUN OUT! The last few dregs are still being distributed for
the next 18 months or so, but many of us won't be able to get
any of those addresses. Most ISPs are already in a position
where their supply has ceased. It's like a force of nature
that we can't control, and nobody is going to seriously sue
ARIN because they didn't reserve a few addresses for foolish
little organizations and startups.

The smart money is now betting on IPv6.

--Michael Dillon