address-policy-wg-admin@ripe.net wrote on 16/06/2006 11:13:59:
Oh I could do that. But then... What the hell are policies for anyway! That's the scope of this thread really.
Policies are there to guide RIPE members and RIPE NCC employees. If you read RIPE-267 it says:
d) have a plan for making at least 200 /48 assignments to other organisations within two years.
It doesn't say that you follow the plan exactly or the addresses will be taken away. It does not say that you forever give up your rights to change your plans. It does not say that the plan must be accomplished without setting up new business units. It does not require you to spend a specific amount of money implementing your plan. It does not tell you that you must have assigned 100 of those /48s by the end of the next year.
This policy seems to have triggered something in our human psychology because many people in many countries have reacted to this wording like you have. For some reason, almost everyone who reads this policy believes that it contains requirements which are not written there.
For that reason alone, it should be changed. Criteria a), b), and c) really are good enough reason to give an IPv6 /32 to an LIR.
But, we are talking about 2006-2 which also changes the text of b) and c):
a) be an LIR b) plan to provide IPv6 connectivity to other organisations or to its own/related departments/entities/sites to which it will assign /48s by advertising that connectivity through a single aggregated address allocation
I agree wholeheartedly with this change to the wording. The present policy excludes Nominet, which is an Enterprise LIR, from gaining an IPv6 allocation as we have no customers per se. We do have an intention to make our services, including .uk DNS, available over IPv6.
and
c) have a plan for making a reasonable number of /48 assignments within two years
This is also better than an arbritrary figure.
It seems like a reasonable change to me.
--Michael Dillon
Ian