ARIN IP6 policy for those with legacy IP4 Space

Sun Apr 11 18:21:17 UTC 2010

Owen,

On Apr 11, 2010, at 6:39 AM, Owen DeLong wrote:
> Instead, we have a situation where the mere mention
> of requiring legacy holders to pay a token annual fee like the rest
> of IP end-users in the ARIN region leads to discussions like this.

I don't believe the issue is the token annual fee. My guess is that most legacy holders would be willing to pay a "reasonable" service fee to cover rDNS and registration database maintenance (they'd probably be more willing if there were multiple providers of that service, but that's a separate topic).  I suspect the issue might be more related to stuff like:

> Especially in light of
> the fact that if you are sitting on excess resources and want
> to be able to transfer them under NRPM 8.3, you will need
> to bring them under LRSA or RSA first and the successor who
> acquires them from you (under 8.2 or 8.3) will need to sign an
> RSA for the transfer to be valid.

You appear to be assuming folks are willing to accept ARIN has the right and ability to assert the above (and more).   That is, that the entire policy regime under which the NRPM has been defined is one that legacy holders are implicitly bound simply because they happen to operate in ARIN's service region and received IP addresses in the past without any real terms and conditions or formal agreement.  I imagine the validity of your assumption will not be established without a definitive legal ruling. I'm sure it will be an interesting court case.

In any event, it seems clear that some feel that entering into agreements and paying fees in order to obtain IPv6 address space is hindering deployment of IPv6.  While ARIN has in the past waived fees for IPv6, I don't believe there has ever been (nor is there likely to be) a waiver of signing the RSA. Folks who want that should probably get over it.

To try to bring this back to topics relevant to NANOG (and not ARIN's PPML), the real issue is that pragmatically speaking, the only obvious alternative to IPv6 is multi-layer NAT and it seems some people are trying to tell you that regardless of how much you might hate multi-layer NAT, how much more expensive you believe it will be operationally, and how much more limiting and fragile it will be because it breaks the end-to-end paradigm, they believe it to be a workable solution.  Are there _any_ case studies, analyses with actual data, etc. that shows multi-layer NAT is not workable (scalable, operationally tractable, etc.) or at least is more expensive than IPv6? 

Regards,
-drc