[arin-ppml] ARIN Advisory Council Thoughts about IPv4 Policies

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

On 5/14/2010 7:51 AM, Joe Maimon wrote:
>
>
> Sweeting, John wrote:
>> To All Members of the Community,
>>
>> The AC strongly believes that the whole of the ARIN community requires
>> and deserves a stable policy environment in order to better prepare
>> and plan for IPv4 run out and deployment of IPv6.
>>
>> With that in mind, the AC would like to advise the community that
>> unless a proposal affecting IPv4 assignments has a compelling benefit
>> for and receives strong initial support from the community the AC will
>> most likely choose to abandon the proposal. The AC recognizes its
>> commitment to the community and after introspection and discussion has
>> concluded that this is the best course of action. Please provide
>> comments either through PPML or directly to individual AC members.
>>
>> On Behalf of the ARIN Advisory Council,
>>
>> John Sweeting, Chair
>
> John, AC
>
> I have chosen to respond to this message, which is far more measured
> than some of the followups, which frankly speaking, have tones of
> defeatism and fatalism to them and are quite discouraging.
>

I have to disagree with that.  The AC is obviously trying to move the
community focus on IPv6 and away from IPv4.  Pointing out that this is
like trying to stop a locomotive with a snowball isn't defeatist.  It's
being realistic.

As I stated already, as long as IPv4 is regarded as necessary to
doing business as an ISP, post IPv4 "runout", we are going to have
people wanting to modify policy, despite that the AC wants to shift
focus to IPv6.

I am certainly not advocating in favor of such behavior.  THAT might be
defeatist.  I am merely saying it's going to continue no matter what you
or the AC or I want.  And the other posters to this thread - including
YOU in this post - have echoed that.

> Taking a knee on the end game is the wrong call.
>
> To the extent that this statement represents a shift in how the AC plans
> to handle IPv4 proposals, I believe it is the wrong direction and may
> improperly reflect the AC's apparent bias related to the IPv4 end game.
>

I think there would be something wrong if the AC WASN'T biased against IPv4.

> To the extent that this statement represents a belief that mass IPv6
> adoption will be negatively affected by any attempts to modify the end
> game, I put forth that it is cognitive dissonance to trumpet a solution
> whose adoption prospects are so frail that they hinge on sudden mass pain.
>
> Firming policy so that organizations can make plans is ludicrous. The
> only plan that needs to be made is adoption and migration of IPv6.

This is the ideal.  The reality is that IPv4 policy and IPv6 adoption 
are related.

For example in past years we have discussed the idea of IPv4 
reclamation.  There is, in fact, a LOT of policy that could be made here
that would pressure ISP's to let go of IPv4 that they are holding and
not using, or using sparsely.  For example many ISP's use public /30's 
on point to point links that could be changed to use IP unnumbered. 
Many ISP's allocate /29's to end users who order static IP's even when 
the end user only ever uses 1 IPv4 IP address out of that.  Many ISP's 
still run webhosts that assign a fixed IP per website.  NAT could be
used increasingly at the ISP rather than at the customer site.  And so
on and so on.

There is also a lot of small IPv4 subnets that were directly assigned
that are abandoned.  For example I have repeatedly posted in this
forum about subnet 199.248.255.0/24 which belonged to a customer of ours
who stopped using it a decade ago.  I've informed ARIN multiple times
and I informed them about this subnet when we got our allocation 6 years
ago.  Yet it is still out there, abandoned, and unused.  That is plenty
proof enough to me that ARIN isn't serious about IPv4 abandoned subnet
reclamation.

If the community got the ball rolling on IPv4 reclamation it would
eventually produce more IPv4 and that would slow the adoption of IPv6.
What the AC appears to be trying to do is make sure that no crank out 
there in the community is able to start the ball rolling on something 
like this, or start the ball rolling on fee modifications, or any number 
of other IPv4 schemes that would result in freeing up IPv4 - at the cost 
of a large amount of disruption of IPv4 - because those would 
temporarily slow the adoption of IPv6.

I can't say that this attitude of the AC's is good or bad, but I CAN say
that it's immaterial, since it's not going to stop the flood of people
with these kind of schemes.

> Organizations are either planning to do so or not. A few months more or
> less of IPv4 availability should not be changing anything in places
> where plans translate into large budgets.
>
> Organizations whose plans include banking on no further policy changes
> to allow them to delay their IPv6 plans have not made sound plans and
> should not be of special concern.
>
> Those whose plans do not include adoption of IPv6 well in time of demand
> seem to be taking the position that our stated predictions are not quite
> accurate.
>
> Preventing policy changes to address a potential partial or complete
> failure of IPv6 to solve the needs of the community in a timely manner
> due to fears of negatively affecting IPv6 chances of doing so results in
> a deadlock. That cant be right.
>

I don't know if it's right.  But this kind of a deadlock simply does not
exist and can never exist because it's existence assumes that it would 
even be possible for there to be a complete or partial failure of IPv6 
to solve the needs of the community in a timely manner.

IPv6 is what it is.  We know how to use it to solve our needs.  There 
are no longer any "showstopper bugs" in new gear that are in the way of 
deployment.  If you know of any, please do tell.

> I submit that far more important to IPv6 adoption would be a stable IPv6
> policy environment.
>
> To make my views of IPv6 clear, I think it just needs more time. Time
> for more standards and policies supporting peoples desired utilization
> modes. Time for more network to properly support it. Time for more
> equipment, enterprise and residential, to properly support it. Time for
> take-up to accelerate. Managing the end-game may provide that time.
>

Or, it may simply delay it more.

You mentioned time for more equipment, enterprise and residential, to 
properly support it. WHAT equipment exactly is this?  Enterprise gear 
already supports it.  Just about ALL residential routers these days are 
built on Linux (busybox, usually) and Linux supports IPv6.  It would
be no more than 2-3 months of effort for any networking company like
Netgear/Dlink/Linksys/etc. to turn on IPv6 support in their products
and offer it as a firmware update.  And if you didn't want to wait that
long dd-wrt and openwrt support it and run on the residential gear NOW.

There is NO evidence that giving it any more time is going to do 
anything.  If it was a situation with Windows 7 where Windows 7's IPv6
support was like Windows XP's IPv6 support well then you would have
something.  But it isn't.

The AC's position of damn the torpedos, full speed ahead has NO LESS
validity than your position of let's do what we can to eke out a few 
more years of IPv4.

If you REALLY BELIEVE in your proposition that we need to spend a lot
more time on IPv4 policy tweaks then HAVE FAITH IN YOUR POSITION.  As
I already stated, the AC position merely "informalizes" what is already
part of the process, so if YOU ARE right, then the community will surely
see this sometime in the future and there then will indeed be, as the
AC put it, IPv4 proposals that "have a compelling benefit for and 
receive strong initial support from the community"

Ted