[arin-ppml] Draft Policy ARIN-2018-1: Allow Inter-regional ASN Transfers

[Job Snijders]

On Thu, Feb 01, 2018 at 12:30:31PM -0500, hostmaster at uneedus.com wrote:
> I would be opposed to allowing inter regional IPv6 Transfers.
> 
> One of the main benefits of IPv6 over IPv4 is the reduction of routing
> table size.  Allowing inter regional transfers would start the road to
> larger routing tables. 

I'd appreciate evidence that allowing interregional transfers leads to
larger routing tables. Administrative resource management is somewhat
orthogonal to BGP announcements. Whether the resource is managed by RIR
A vs RIR B bears no direct relation to the BGP announcements and routing
tables.

> We allowed a lot of this in IPv4 because of shortages of addresses.
> This is not in fact true in the IPv6 world. Growth in address use in
> IPv4 resulted in most networks having more than one block of
> addresses.  From what I understand, sparse assigment methods are being
> used in IPv6, allowing those few networks that actually had to grow
> beyond their original allocation to grow into blocks of space right
> next to the space they already occupy, helping to keep the routing
> tables smaller.  During the time we were discussing 2017-5, I asked
> how may ARIN members had grown beyond their original block of IPv6
> addresses, and I believe the answer was zero.
> 
> IPv6 allows for a host to use more than one address and network.  This
> makes multihoming or renumbering a lot simpler than it was in the IPv4
> world.  I can simply provide more than one router and associated
> network block for each provider, and allow the hosts to obtain an
> address on each of them and to route between them as they see fit.  I
> can also deprecate one of the available networks, and all new
> connections will be made using the remaining networks and routes.
> This allows easy renumbering.
>
> It is not a big hardship to renumber in IPv6 unlike IPv4, so I would
> like to not end up with lots of exceptions in the routing tables, and
> to keep the registration records simpler.

You are describing a very specific deployment model. We cannot assume
that every deployment uses that model, nor build policy based on that
assumption. My own experience tells me that renumbering IPv6 is as much
work as renumbering IPv4.

Kind regards,

Job