ARIN IP6 policy for those with legacy IP4 Space

Fri Apr 9 12:34:36 UTC 2010

On Apr 8, 2010, at 2:51 PM, Kevin Stange wrote:
> 
> On 04/08/2010 01:47 PM, Dorn Hetzel wrote:
>> If there was an automatic website that just handed out up to a /40 on
>> demand, and charged a one-time fee of $100, I don't think the space
>> would ever be exhausted, there isn't enough money.
> 
> I'd hate to see that routing table.

Another bright gentleman many years ago suggested that we have an online 
website which allows anyone to pay a fee and get an address block. This 
is not inconceivable, but does completely set aside hierarchical routing
which is currently an underlying mechanism for making our addressing 
framework scalable.

Another way to accomplish this would be a functional global model for the
settlement of costs relating to routing entries, and which would effectively
be against routing entries caused by unique "provider-independent" prefixes.
ISPs today don't get specifically compensated for routing a PI address block, 
but they do get to participate in the various RIR processes and have some say 
in the impacts of public policies as they are discussed. Historically, this 
has proved to be sufficient input that ISPs generally respect the tradeoffs 
inherent in the approved policy, and will route the result.

If you have an economic mechanism which handles this function instead, and 
an abundance of resources (e.g. IPv6), then it might be possible to operate 
under very different assumptions than the present Internet registry system,
and the resulting costs of operating the registry portion could be minimal.

The implementation of this is left as an exercise for the reader...
/John

p.s. These are my personal thoughts only and in no way reflect any position
     of ARIN or the ARIN Board of Trustees. I provide them solely to help 
     outline some of the tradeoffs inherent in the current Registry system.