* Hans Petter Holen
for me the following are open issues for me
-1 how it will affect inter region transfers - if this is important to the community 1 - presently it will not be simple to establish an inter-RIR transfer policy with Arin. Personally - based on previous discussion at Ripe meeting and other places - I do not think the Arin communicty will change opinion on this, at least until they run out.
To answer the "is it important to the community" you don't have to look further than to proposal 2012-02, which, if accepted, would allow for inter-region transfers with ARIN (and APNIC). However, this proposal has gone nowhere; there appears to be practically no interest in it. Sandra Brown, the author of 2012-02, even stated in an earlier message that the proposal had been withdrawn. The www.ripe.net PDP pages does not (yet?) reflect this, but nevertheless the proposal is beyond any doubt "on ice". So the answer seems to be a resounding "NO".
This could be an issue as the "hidden reserves" of "legacy" assignments are in the Arin region.
Up until the moment of depletion, APNIC was using IPv4 faster than any other RIR by a huge margin. I think it reasonable to conclude that by now there must be a huge unmet need for IPv4 space in the APNIC region. APNIC and ARIN happens to share compatible inter-region transfer policies. Yet, the number of inter-region transfers going from the ARIN region to the APNIC region is negligible - at RIPE66 the total amount of transfers was reported to be 11 (5 per annum, if extrapolating linearly). So the notion that there is some big hidden reserve sitting around in the ARIN region, ripe for the taking and ready to transform our current our state of scarcity into one of abundance (if we only pass an inter-region transfer policy!), seems extremely implausible to me. At least it has not worked out that way for the APNIC region. That said, if having an inter-region transfer policy that is compatible with ARIN's becomes important to us at a later stage, it is quite possible to add back whatever "need basis" is necessary to placate ARIN then. APNIC prop-096 is a demonstration of exactly this being done.
-2 how will it affect reclamation of address space by RIRs - and is this important 2 - I think reclamation by the RIPE NCC will decay over time.
While I concur that the NCC's reclamation rate will likely decay over time, I doubt 2013-03 will make any difference whatsoever in this regard. There is by now enough unmet demand in our region that all addresses that are likely to be offered on the market would have no problem finding a new owner ("need" requirement notwithstanding). Or to put it another way, the notion that an LIR that wants to sell an allocation would be unable to find a *single* willing buyer strikes me as completely unrealistic. So whatever the motivation an LIR might have for voluntarily surrendering an unused allocation to the NCC instead of selling it might be - I don't see how the removal of the need requirement on the buyer's part could possibly have anything to it.
-3 how wil it affet the critics of the RIRs 3 - the traders will be happy - he ITUs and critical governments will probably make more noice. how much of an issue is this to us?
I don't doubt the ITU and "critical governments" will make whatever noise they can, on whatever grounds they can, regardless of the validity of the arguments they may muster. This is nothing new, though, it's an ongoing struggle that we'll have to deal with anyway. Put it another way, I highly doubt that *not* passing 2013-03 is likely to make the ITU and critical government cease to be a thorn in our side. (They might as well take any failure of 2013-03 to form another attack: «Your IPv4 policies are clearly out of touch with reality and your community has proven itself unable to fix them. We'll take it from here, thankyouverymuch...») Furthermore, there are plenty of other policies, services, and events that these critical entities could use to mount attacks in some way or another. Some examples: 2006-02, 2007-08, 2009-06, 2010-02, 2012-02, the IPv4 Transfer Listing Service, the Recognised IPv4 Transfer Brokers listing, Resource Certification, the IPv4 depletion event itself, and indeed 2013-03. I'm not claiming that any attacks against the NCC or the community based on argumentation stemming from any of the above would be at all valid - just that 2013-03 is not unique in this regard. In the end I don't think we should make (or not make) policies in order to kowtow to the ITU or any government entity, in the hope that they will not try to "take away our toys". If they want our toys, they'll come after them anyway, and we'll have to stand up to them. What gives us legitimacy as a community (and by extension the NCC), is that the policies we make are for the benefit of the Internet, and not in the pursuit of any political power struggle goals. Best regards, Tore Anderson