[arin-ppml] IPv4 Transfer Policy Change to Keep Whois Accurate

[Mike Burns]

Mike -

 Efficient use of address space is a reasonable match to the goal of
 "conservation", but what do you propose with respect to the goal of
 "aggregation" under such a model?

/John




Hi John,

First, I don't see the evidence in the transfers we are aware of that 
aggregation was much of a consideration.
And especially with the ARIN staff decision to apply the single aggregate 
terminology to the needs requirement and not to the actual transfer.

Second, it is up to the network operators, who bear the costs of 
disaggregation, to make the decisions as to what is an acceptable prefix.
In the long run, we will have disaggregation either way.

The minimal generally acceptable prefix length may vary, and I think the 
price of netblocks near the border of the minimum size would reflect their 
potential routability.

I'm unclear on how current transfer policy affects aggregation, can you 
help?

If I qualified for a /20 but I found two suppliers with /21s, would I  be 
allowed to make two purchases under the current policy?
If I qualified for a /20 but I found one suppler with two /21s, would I be 
allowed to make the purchase of both netblocks under current policy?
If there was a /20 available on STLS but the price was higher, would I be 
required to make the purchase as a single block?
If it were cheaper to buy some /24s, and some /23s to make up a /20 in 
aggregate would that be okay?

I guess the goal of aggregation can be viewed as applying to the free pool, 
and with allocations from a free pool it is possible to dole out the most 
efficient large blocks that would serve the goal of aggregation. But in the 
trading market, regardless of needs requirements, how can we maintain that 
goal when we don't have the big block of free pool addresses to carve 
allocations out of?

I think aggregation is out of our hands now, and up to the network operator 
community to deal with.


Regards,
Mike