[arin-ppml] 2014-3 Remove 8.2/8.3/8.4 Minimum IPv4 Block Size Requirements

[David Huberman]

Hi Scott,

Thanks for the great reply.  I agree with a lot of what you are saying.

I guess I'm stuck on the idea that this doesn't belong in ARIN policy.  As you well note, ARIN policy is reflecting what has been the operational reality for a while now.  And as you state, we could keep changing the policy to match whatever happens in the future.  But I guess I don't feel that's necessary; I feel that ARIN policy should be agnostic on prefix size.   Hence my proposal.

I look forward to discussing solutions in Chicago. :)

David R Huberman
Microsoft Corporation
Senior IT/OPS Program Manager (GFS)

From: Scott Leibrand [mailto:scottleibrand at gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2014 11:52 AM
To: David Huberman
Cc: ARIN-PPML List
Subject: Re: [arin-ppml] 2014-3 Remove 8.2/8.3/8.4 Minimum IPv4 Block Size Requirements

On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 11:34 AM, David Huberman <David.Huberman at microsoft.com<mailto:David.Huberman at microsoft.com>> wrote:
> But regardless of the legal piece, I see no upside, and quite a bit of downside, to allowing IPv4 /32 transfers.
Please articulate the "quite a bit of downside".  If we ignore the legal piece of your argument, as you said to, what are the problems with /32 transfers to the technical operations of the internet? I've only seen the legal argument in your replies so far, hence my request.

Also, I believe ARIN is the wrong place for such constraints.  I believe operators should make the decision on such matters - not central numbers registries which suffer from very very low participation.  You can choose to reply to that or not, of course, but I think it's very germane to the meat of this proposal:  why does ARIN get to set this basement???

Ok, setting aside the Legal thing (based on John's reply), I see this as mostly an expectations and externalities thing.  Right now, I can make any size BGP announcement I want to my peers (as Marty pointed out), and that works fine. But no one is *expecting* me to accept IPv4 /32s via my peers and transit providers from some unrelated entity across the country/world.

I think ARIN policy needs to be in line with what operators are doing (or will soon want to do).  I think removing minimum transfer sizes entirely would act as a forcing function that moves us too far down the "you must route this" path.  What is actually needed in the next few years is to be able to transfer /25s and maybe even /28s, not /32s.

Where ARIN is telling operators they can't do what they want, I would agree with you that we should stop doing that.  But AFAICT no operators actually want to transfer and try to get everyone to globally route IPv4 /32s, so ARIN's policy here is just reflecting reality.

-Scott

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