[arin-ppml] IPv6 policy: merge ISP and end-user?

[William Herrin]

Howdy,

I didn't see any feedback on the draft policy rewriting section 6.5,
so I want to step back and solicit your opinions on what ARIN's IPv6
policies should become. I'm going to ask some questions and break them
into separate message threads so that they can be followed separately
according to your interest.


The question for this thread is: Should we attempt to merge ISP and
end-user IPv6 address allocation policy?


Traditionally, long ago when the InterNIC Hostmaster ran IPv4 address
allocation, there was no distinction between ISPs and end users. If
you wanted IP addresses, you got them. If you wanted a lot of IP
addresses you had to explain why. Being an ISP was a good reason.
There were a number of other good reasons. There was no specific
category for ISPs.

Around the time the InterNIC was divided up into ICANN and the RIRs,
there was another important event in Internet history: the EGP routing
table crisis. With the sudden public interest in the Internet in the
mid-'90s and the corresponding explosive growth, we nearly exhausted
the capacity of the backbone routing table. Through a heroic effort of
the standards bodies and the software and hardware developers at the
router vendors, we replaced Classful routing with CIDR and EGP with
BGP, averting the crisis with literally weeks to spare.

Coming out of the crisis, the smart people in the know said: Never
again. We're going to give large IP address blocks to ISPs who will
consume one slot in the BGP table. To the maximum extent practical,
end users aren't going to have their own routes in the BGP table.

This division between haves and have-nots was embedded deeply into
every RIR's address allocation policy.

The last quarter century has been a slow but steady retreat from that
position. Efficient use of /19 became /20 and then dragged all the way
back to the original class C, /24 limit where we are today. No one
ever developed a satisfactory replacement for BGP multihoming, not
even with IPv6. And slicing a /24 out of ISP space for an end-user to
multihome turns out to have problems if you don't also disaggregate
the entire larger block in BGP. Which is a bad thing. So BGP
multihoming has become re-recognized as a proper reason for end users
to have their own IP addresses from ARIN. Even the ARIN fee schedule
and membership rights have been unified. The major remaining vestige
of the original division between ISP and end-user is the requirement
for ISPs to report their customer registrations with SWIP and their
ability to record those registrations as in-use. End-users
theoretically don't have downstream customer registrations to report
or record.

This presents an opportunity. As we look at replacing the thick
language in the IPv6 policies, we can try to make the policy uniform:
the same fair policy for everybody, end users and ISPs both.

What do you think? Would you like to take a stab at it, or do you
prefer that the ISP/end user division stay where it is? Your views are
respectfully requested.

Regards,
Bill Herrin