ARIN IP6 policy for those with legacy IP4 Space

Thu Apr 8 20:35:19 UTC 2010

> On 04/08/2010 02:17 PM, Joe Greco wrote:
> >> If we just eliminated the RIRs and agreements governing terms of acces=
> s
> >> to v6 allocations, IF later, we find a problem with the process and
> >> start to run out of space, we end up in the same situation.  Suddenly =
> we
> >> have to form these organizations again, and institute new allocation
> >> policies for new allocations, but again lack any recourse for all thos=
> e
> >> people that "greedily" ate up as much space as they could.
> >=20
> > Then guard against _that_, which is a real problem.
> 
> That /is/ the RIRs' function now.  ARIN policy is not immutable.
> Proposals to change it are welcomed.  I see no reason that we have to
> throw ARIN out of this picture in order to solve your perceived problem
> of too much regulation and overhead.

The problem, as I've heard it, is that ARIN's fees are steep in order to
pay for various costs.  Since there isn't the economy of scale of hundreds
of millions of domain names, and instead you just have ... what?  Probably 
less than a hundred thousand objects that are revenue-generating?  If you
charge $1/yr for each registered object, that means your organizational 
budget is sufficient for one full time person, maybe two.  At $100/yr, you
have enough funding for some office space, some gear, and a small staff.

So when you run into expensive stuff, like litigation, the best course of
action is to avoid it unless you absolutely can't.

Further, if you've suffered mission creep and are funding other things
such as IPv6 educational outreach, that's going to run up your costs as
well.

An established entity like ARIN typically has a very rough time going on
any sort of diet.  Further, companies typically do not segregate their
"products" well:  if IPv4 policy enforcement runs into legal wrangling
and lawsuits, ARIN as a whole gets sued, and it is tempting to spread
the resulting expenses over all their products.  Segregation into two
(or more!) entities is a trivial way to fix that, though it also brings
about other challenges.

> >> I think there's a continued need to keep an organization in charge of
> >> accounting for the space to whom we as resource holders are accountabl=
> e
> >> and whom is also accountable to us.  Later on, when we realize we've
> >> gone wrong somewhere (and it will happen) and need to make changes to
> >> policy, there is a process by which we can do it where all the parties=
> 
> >> involved already have an established relationship.
> >=20
> > That sets off my radar detector a bit.  If you're justifying the need=20
> > for current policies with that statement, I'd have to disagree...  the
> > desire to potentially make changes in the future is not itself a=20
> > compelling reason to have strongly worded agreements.  Even in v4land,
> > we've actually determined that one of the few relatively serious=20
> > reasons we'd like to reclaim space (depletion) is probably impractical.=
> 
> >=20
> > With that in mind, claims that there needs to be thorough accounting
> > kind of comes off like "trust us, we're in charge, we know what we need=
> 
> > but we can't really explain it aside from invoking the boogeyman."
> 
> ARIN doesn't so simply say "trust us, we're in charge."  Every dealing
> I've ever had with the organization has encouraged me to participate in
> the policy making process in some regard.  Ideally policy should
> appropriately reflect how the regional users of IP resources feel things
> should be managed and hand down terms for allocation to match.
> 
> The intention is for the accountability to go in both directions, from
> resource holders to the RIR and from the RIR to the community.  If you
> don't think that's working for ARIN, I'm sure ARIN can be fixed.

I have my doubts, based on a ~decade of observation.  I don't think ARIN
is deliberately evil, but I think there are some bits that'd be hard to
fix.

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.