[arin-ppml] ARIN-prop-137 Global Policy for post exhaustion IPv4 allocation mechanisms by the IANA

[Martin Hannigan]

On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 5:19 PM, Gary Buhrmaster
<gary.buhrmaster at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 20:24, Matthew Kaufman <matthew at matthew.at> wrote:
>> On 3/23/2011 1:16 PM, Owen DeLong wrote:
>>>
>>> Would you support equal distribution in an environment where need exceeds
>>> availability? If not, what
>>> mechanism would you support for distributing space in such conditions?
>>
>>
>> Highest bidder.
>
> How would the RIRs be expected to valud/bid for the numbers?

The idea is for resource users, that's us, to have cheap and easy
access to legacy addresses. Not to pay premiums on space that is
already in the inventory. Asking the RIR's to bid on available address
space only increases all of our costs and would actually be unfair
since the balance sheets of each region are dramatically different.
You might be surprised that even one or more of the larger RIR's might
be hobbled in such an arrangement.

A problem with sending addresses to the IANA and then letting them
send them to anyone else is that they are likely to almost immediately
end up on the secondary market in another region with weaker controls.
What you pay now for addresses will not be the same that you will pay
later especially if you are buying addresses that we already had in
our inventory back from someone in another region who didn't even have
to qualify for them. Without something codified, we're subject to the
weakest link and there are some seriously weak links out there in RIR
land.

> I suspect that by the time any global policy can be enacted to
> allow distribution from IANA all regions will have need.  Trying
> to determine which need is greater is likely more complex
> and politically charged than a simple equal distribution.


That's possible, but I suspect unlikely. LACNIC and AFRINIC have
resources for "years" to come depending upon the policies that they
implement in the future. APNIC claims that they'll have address for
years under their austerity measure. Based on discussions that I've
been observing, I'd say "years" is a safe bet in the "developing"
regions. They're talking about exclusions of applicants and other
mechanisms to insure that noone except someone definitively in their
region gets resources. That's quite different that the way that things
operate today and will result in higher costs for some of us. In
contrast, ARIN has resources for months.

Perhaps if all RIR's had to give back anything more than the
equivalent of a /9 and we revamped the distribution policy for the
IANA that would be more fair? It would insure that all RIR's would run
out as close as possible. But even if we like that, a few of the other
RIR's will most definitely not like it so we're back to tossing
political footballs back and forth like we are now.

Best,

-M<