On Mar 22, 2013, at 2:24 AM, Tore Anderson <tore@fud.no> wrote:
3) The RIPE community's benefit of allowing transfers from the ARIN region into the RIPE region is only obvious due to the fact that ARIN still has remaining free space in their address pool. «They've still got more space, let's go grab as much of it as we can before it's all gone!»
It is not certain that it is a net benefit to the RIPE community to allow transfers with depleted regions. The result may very well be that more address space is being transferred *out* of our region, than what is coming in - further exacerbating our depletion ordeal. This uncertainty makes the cost-benefit analysis I mentioned in #2 even more clear in favour of 2013-03.
According to Geoff Huston, ARIN looks set to deplete exactly one year from now. Keeping in mind that 2012-02 appears to still have a long way to go in the PDP, the time period during which the benefit of allowing free trade with ARIN is obvious is only going to be a few months at most. Quite possibly, ARIN will deplete before 2012-02 gets implemented, if so the obvious beneficial period will not exist at all.
I am not advocating for a policy outcome one way or the other, but should also note that there is a significant amount of early address assignments in the ARIN region (e.g. those that were classsful and done in 80's and early 90's) which may still be underutilized and therefore (with some effort) could become available as parties decide if renumbering down to free up some of the remainder is worthwhile. This is independent of the space being issued from ARIN's free pool, and hence is relevant even after depletion of the free pool in the ARIN region. Also note that source entities within the ARIN region must not have received a transfer, allocation, or assignment of IPv4 number resources from ARIN for the 12 months prior to the approval of a transfer request (this restriction does not include M&A transfers), so parties issued space from ARIN's free pool between now and its depletion are not likely to be able to make use of the Inter-RIR transfer policy in any case. FYI, /John John Curran President and CEO ARIN