[arin-ppml] Is Emergency action warranted for Policy Proposal 123: Reserved Pool for Critical Infrastructure?

[Eric Brunner-Williams]

Scott,

You ask "[do I] believe proposal 123 should allow TLD operators to 
delay IPv6 deployment?"

If 123 is adopted, and if a similar policy is adopted in RIRs that 
provide allocations to "developing economies", then the existence of 
the policy provides a basis to argue that v6 capacity may be deferred 
from no later than the transition to delegation period to some point 
in time subsequent. Whether the deferral is for one year or three is 
not as important as making the policy choice that applicants will fail 
if, at transition to delegation, they do not have v6 capacity.

To grasp the full import, assume 1k applications, with between 60% and 
80% survival to "transition to delegation", in the 2011 cohort 
reaching this state in 2012 and compelled to complete the transition 
in a fixed period. To make it worse, bear in mind that all of the 1k 
applicants need to have committed, when submitting their applications, 
in late 2010 or early 2011, their v6 capabilities.

If half do not use existing legacy platforms, VGRS etc., than on the 
order of a third of all applicant-operators are at risk of 
administrative failure, or of operational failure, for lack or, or 
lack of experience with a single point of failure, v6 capacity.

The naive v6 requirement, like several others, but this one is the 
only one which raises an ASO, hence an NRO, hence an ARIN policy 
issue, is likely to have the effect of channeling applicants to the 
existing legacy legacy platforms. It "raises the bar" for competition 
to the existing legacy legacy platforms, or the need for competencies 
for which existing registry operators have no contractual obligation 
to meet.

As your question goes to my beliefs, I believe that existing data 
centers are not going to cease servicing requests for data from v4 
addresses. I also believe that existing data centers are not going to 
be as immediately, or as critically, affected by v4 exhaustion as are 
access network operators.

I suggest that the overwhelming majority of addresses used by domain 
registrants will be, during the same period that new registries are 
experiencing their first operational year(s) in the 2011 round of new 
gTLDs, v4 addresses.

As to your beliefs, with respect, if "the main driver for requiring 
new TLD operators to be v6 capable is to ensure that new Internet 
users, who will have IPv6 as their primary connectivity, will be able 
to access the TLD nameservers over IPv6", then we, as two policy 
development communities, are indifferent to the interests of new 
Internet users in existing resources made available through a name to 
address mapping mechanism, and we are indifferent to the interests of 
existing Internet users in the organization of existing resources 
through a name to address mapping mechanism.

Existing resources currently used in rural North America can be named 
in a new rural North American namespace without necessarily being 
renumbered and existing resources currently used in Africa can also be 
named in a new african namespace, also without necessarily being 
renumbered.

Thank you for your thoughtful question, and also John Sweeting, who 
suggested that all subscribers to PPML provide their thoughts on the 
proposals and the the criteria each used to come to their conclusions.

Eric