[arin-ppml] Draft Policy ARIN-2013-4: RIR Principles - revised

[Chris Grundemann]

On Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 8:39 AM, Mike Burns <mike at nationwideinc.com> wrote:
> I see conservation not as a principle, I mean really the guiding principle
> should have been distribution of addresses, not conservation of them.
> The goal was to grow the Internet through the dissemination of addresses.
> Conservation was not the principle, it was the means to prevent the emptying
> of the free pool by bad actors.

Not true. As I have pointed out in several fora several times before,
conservation of the number space is NOT the same as conservation of a
free pool of addresses. The principle here is conservation of the
number space - the whole thing, not one arbitrary slice of it.

The definition of conservation from the science dictionary may be
helpful in illustrating what is meant by conservation of Internet
numbers: Conservation is generally held to include the management of
human use of natural resources for current public benefit and
sustainable social and economic utilization. In this case the resource
is the unique Internet number spaces (not just free pools).

> These recent incarnations of this proposal continue to try to shoehorn
> conservation as a principle, even to the point of including conservation
> inside registration.
> I don’t think it is either a principal or a goal, for that matter, just a
> protective mechanism for free pool addresses.
> With the exhaustion of the free pool, conservation has no place in the NRPM.
> Until that time, we don’t need to clutter the NRPM with some hoary language
> from another era.

If I can be so trite as to quote myself:

"Understanding that the useful life of IPv4 is far from over (raise
your hand if you have used IPv4 for a critical communication in the
past 24 hours) makes it quite easy to see that we still have a need to
"maximise the lifetime of the public IPv4 address space."

In fact, the IANA and RIR free pools have essentially been a buffer
protecting us from those who would seek to abuse the public IPv4
address space. As long as there was a reserve of IPv4 addresses,
perturbations caused by bad actors could be absorbed to a large extent
by doling out "new" addresses into the system under the care of more
responsible folks. Now that almost all of the public IPv4 address
space has moved from RIR pools into the "wild," there is arguably a
much greater need to practice conservation. The loss of the RIR free
pool buffer does not mark the end of "the lifetime of the public IPv4
address space" as Tore suggests but rather marks our entry into a new
phase of that lifetime where stockpiling and hoarding have become even
more dangerous."[1]

> I am still against the proposal.

As is your right.

Cheers,
~Chris

[1] - http://www.circleid.com/posts/20130523_removing_need_at_ripe/

> Regards,
> Mike Burns

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--
@ChrisGrundemann
http://chrisgrundemann.com