Nigel, On Feb 25, 2009, at 12:08 AM, Nigel Titley wrote:
This policy is intended to redress that balance, ie to ensure that when address space is recovered in the RIPE, ARIN and APNIC regions (to take an example) it can flow into the LACNIC and AFRINIC regions, who having less history have less address space that can be recovered. Hence the "equitable" description earlier.
My understanding of consumption patterns is that the RIPE, ARIN, and APNIC regions will consume their free pools much more quickly than LACNIC and AfriNIC. Indeed, some projections I've seen have AfriNIC having large blocks of unused address space long past the time when the unallocated pools in the other regions are exhausted. In such a situation, would it be "equitable" for (say) a non-profit, public benefit supplier of Internet connectivity to orphans based in Geneva to be unable to obtain IPv4 address space whereas DeBeers or Shell Nigeria would be able to obtain as much address space as they like? I suspect "equitable" is in the eye of the beholder and it will be important to be very, very explicit as to what particular goals the policy is attempting to reach "equitably". Regards, -drc