[arin-ppml] ARIN-2013-4: RIR Principles / Request for General Thoughts

[Owen DeLong]

On Jun 7, 2013, at 10:12 AM, William Herrin <bill at herrin.us> wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 12:28 PM, Bill Darte <billdarte at gmail.com> wrote:
>> William Herrin via arin.net 10:47 AM (36 minutes ago)
>> On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 10:16 AM, Chris Grundemann <cgrundemann at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 1) Do you support the principle of efficient utilization based on need
>>> (Conservation/Sustainability)?
>> 
>> No. I support the practice but not the principle. Use of the concept
>> of justified need should be pragmatic not dogmatic. Where another
>> practice can be shown to be more effective at achieving
>> sustainability, no guiding principles should dissuade us from using
>> it.
>> 
>> Bill....We've seen the effectiveness with ARIN's practice since
>> '97, but what other practice do you advocate that has
>> demonstrable success with IP addresses?
> 
> Hi Bill,
> 
> We've seen the effectiveness of ARIN-style justified need? Really? I
> see a history of failure. The whole point of it was to not run out of
> addresses until after IPv4 could be deprecated in favor of IPv6.

This is news to me.

I don't believe that was the point for one second, nor do I think such a goal would in any way be achievable within the bounds of what can be done with RIR policy.

> Failed that one. Meanwhile we have wireless carriers running around
> with /9's secured to a state where they could just as effectively have
> used RFC 1918. Because the phone in my pocket can "justify" holding

RFC 1918 is not just as effective. There are limitations placed on subscribers by using RFC-1918 addresses that do not exist with non-RFC 1918 addresses. The community has never achieved consensus on any policy which indicated that given a choice to use RFC-1918 addresses or public addresses for subscribers, RFC-1918 addresses should be used and public addresses cannot be issued. In fact, the policies state quite the opposite.

I believe that the policy as written has been effective in doing what the consensus of the community wanted. The fact that it doesn't happen to agree with your particular world view is a different matter.

> three IP addresses. Failed that one too. And the bureaucratic process
> implementing justified need is so tangled that it's frequently more
> cost effective to set up a clean shell company just to interact with
> ARIN. That's beyond failure, it's just plain nuts.

I don't buy into the "frequency" argument here. Yes, I believe there are corner cases where this may well be true, but I believe that as a fraction of applicants, they are a very small percentage.

I also know that as each corner case has come to light, efforts have been made to improve policy to address them if possible.

Owen