[arin-ppml] An article of interest to the community....

[Owen DeLong]

On Sep 14, 2011, at 7:00 AM, David Farmer wrote:

> On 9/14/11 06:10 CDT, Matthew Kaufman wrote:
> 
>> Which just leads to the question: Why does 8.3 have a restriction to
>> just IPv4? I know of at least one case where some limited assets and an
>> AS number were transferred, but nothing else... 8.3 should be usable for
>> AS numbers as well.
> 
> Fundamentally, there isn't a lot of reason to limit 8.3 to only IPv4. However fundamentally, there isn't a lot reason to allow it for IPv6 or ASNs either.  As Owen said, if you need IPv6 or an ASN you can get them from ARIN, and soon that won't be possible for IPv4.
> 

Fundamentally, there is no reason to allow it for IPv6 or ASN and the need to allow it for IPv4 is an unfortunate artifact of prior IPv4 allocation policies. Since all IPv6 is covered by RSA and ASNs are not facing a run-out issue, there is an extremely limited benefit (if any) to the community for allowing such transfers of ASNs and no benefit for allowing such transfers of IPv6.

> The only real reason for the limit, from my point of view, is that IPv4 transfers are necessary now or soon, IPv6 and ASNs weren't, allowing transfers at all was controversial enough, and it was worth arguing about for IPv6 and ASNs.
> 

Frankly, I'd rather prevent all transfers outside of 8.2, but, because of the limitations imposed on the community by prior IPv4 allocation policies, combined with the shortage of IPv4 addresses, we will need to cope with 8.3 for some time to come. I still think that it is unfortunate that the sunset clause was (somewhat arbitrarily) removed from 8.3.

> Personally I'm not opposed to the idea transfers for IPv6 or ASNs, but I don't support distracting the community with arguing about it, at least while we are dealing with IPv4 exhaustion.  But I'm open to listening to arguments as to why that's being short sighted or just bad policy.
> 

I am completely opposed to such transfers for IPv6. IPv6 is clearly issued under RSA and should be returned to ARIN when it is no longer being utilized as is specified in the RSA.

With regard to ASNs, someone would have to make a clear case that there is some benefit to the community from permitting such transfers, otherwise, I really think there is no reason to do so.
I don't support making policy for the sake of making policy.

Owen