[arin-ppml] Draft Policy ARIN-2019-10: Inter-RIR M&A - Seeking Community Comments

[Job Snijders]

On Mon, Jul 15, 2019 at 11:17:48PM -0400, hostmaster at uneedus.com wrote:
> This means the ENTIRE BLOCK has been assigned to ARIN, and therefore
> ARIN controls the reverse DNS of this entire block.

I think you may be overstating the 'control' aspect. ARIN is part of a
chain of delegations. If we start at the top, the DNS root is not
controlled by ARIN. From the powers that be, ARIN received a delegation
for "0.6.2.ip6.arpa.". Under the "0.6.2.ip6.arpa." zone ARIN delegates
to the next authoritative DNS server in the tree. It is at that
demarcation point where ARIN's control stops.

> If RIR transfers were permitted, ARIN would have to give control of
> the transfered addresses within this block to the RIR(s) involved and
> would no longer control the entire block.

Even if inter-RIR transfers were permitted, ARIN would still
operationally be responsible for all delegations under the
"0.6.2.ip6.arpa." zone. So, no issue there.

> PKI also follows from top to bottom and may not work properly if
> portions of the block are assigned to different RIR(s).

It is curious that you suspect "PKI" (did you mean "RPKI"?) won't work
properly for IPv6, but works arguably for IPv4. Can you please provide
primary sources to back up this assertion? How is there a technical
difference between between IPv4 and IPv6 in this regard?

> More generically, I would call this "ARIN giving up control of
> portions of the Reverse DNS zones to another RIR." It breaks the
> block apart, thus the poster's term "fracturing".

This is a most curious way to describe the situation. This is not
"fracturing", this is DNS delegations working as designed.

> I believe that ARIN should maintain control of 100% of each IPv6 block
> that it receives from IANA. 

> I can understand the term "fracturing" being used to describe what
> would happen to IPv6 blocks received from IANA, if ARIN gave up
> control of specific addresses contained within that block to another
> RIR. If someone wants to receive IPv6 addresses from another RIR, I
> believe that they need to renumber into a block belonging to that RIR.

Sure, I believe those are your beliefs. On the flip side, my beliefs are
that it should be possible to transfer IPv6 blocks from one RIR (ARIN)
to another RIR, and vice versa for reasons mentioned in the last few
months.

IPv6 transfers are already possible between APNIC and RIPE NCC. Neither
in the RIPE NCC or APNIC region have we observed any of the issues that
have been raised in this email thread. The sky didn't fall. Do we really
believe it will be any different for the ARIN region? We already have a
fully functional transfer examples for both IPv4 and ASNs; IPv6 is no
different.

The notion that ARIN's /12 should remain "unfractured" is not rooted in
technical constrains but seems to stem from a desire to force people to
renumber their IPv6 networks, even though there wouldn't be a need to do
so if inter-RIR tranfers are allowed. Artifical restrictions that apply
to IPv6 but not to IPv4, can not positively benefit IPv6 deployment.

"fracturing" is seems to be an overly dramatic way to describe
technical functionality in a system which works as designed.

Kind regards,

Job