Filiz Yilmaz wrote:
With the acceptance of this proposal, the RIPE NCC will conduct a one-time operation to assign a /56 IPv6 PI prefix to all End Users with an IPv4 assignment registered in the RIPE Database.
I agree with Jeroen here that both proposals should be binned immediately or reposted in two and a half months. I think (hope) the intention of 2008-01 was to get some discussion/movement into the whole PIv6 area again, which is desperately needed. First of all, I don't think the majority is afraid of the idea of PI itself (the old "carriers want to constrain their customers" myth), the majority is afraid of running it like it is currently done for IPv4 in the RIPE region. I'm talking about PI space that is visible in the DFZ here of course, unannounced PI space should mostly be covered by ULA. My main concern with IPv4 PI is that there is _no_ reasonable financial incentive to help weighting the pros (you got yourself independent addresses, yay) against the cons (_everyone_ _else_ needs an additional slot in the routing table). The main argument I heard about this is that getting PI space is not free either, because you need to pay the sponsoring LIR to do the work. Unfortunately, in most cases I have seen this work was never billed, because there was no need to do so. Due to the way billing PI space works in the RIPE region (scoring points, only once) LIRs, especially big ones, often don't pay a single cent for the space they have allocated, so everything they need to account for is work. PI requests which are reasonably well justified don't make that much work, and even if not, there are plenty of network engineers/hostmasters sitting around all day idling in IRC. :-) This is at assigning time. Once the address space is assigned, it is basically free. Again there is _no_ incentive to reevaluate the need for this PI space, because renumbering is certainly causing some amount of work which is definitely not offset by the amount of money you will save by giving back this PI space (zero!). Again, there has been the argument that announcing a prefix is not free either, but there are plenty of operators that would gladly announce your PI prefix without additional costs if you buy their 50€ DSL/housing service. This is a very competitive market, at least here in Germany. After all, its just a few lines of routerconfig and if your are pedantic, the registration of the route object in the RIPE database. Announcing additional prefixes is not increasing your transit costs, so after it has been setup, it is free (again) for all parties involved (apart from the DFZ slot again). After the prefix has been assigned, there is no real way for RIPE to track it. The PI space is not linked to a member, they don't exchange any information with the original requestor. Now we are at the end of the requestor's lifecycle (let's just assume it is a company, not personal PI space) and all its assets get dismantled. Normally, the PI space should be returned to the RIR, but at this stage of business only a minority cares about that. Hopefully the remainders have their announcements pulled at least, but is a rule with the well-known exception. Now there is address space that can either be hijacked by anyone else or just "donated" to a former employee/fried of the owner/whatever (compensation?). This most certainly does not match the original PI request anymore, but unless RIPE is given enough clues about it they just can't know. A solution to all this problems is already a RIPE policy proposal (2007-01, http://www.ripe.net/ripe/policies/proposals/2007-01.html). It does not discuss assigning a cost to this membership, but I think this is a generally understood that this membership is not going to be free. By assigning a _direct_ and _recurring_ fee to address space you don't fix every instance of a case mentioned above, but the majority. People will think about requesting PI space because there IS a cost figure directly assigned to it (and not to some weird scoring point for a third party), they should think about the necessity of the assignment every year when they get the bill and if the company gets shut down it either gets cancelled properly (there is a contract) or gets cancelled when the next bill is not paid up. Of course, someone who has been given that address space can just continue paying on his own, but he will think about the necessity as well. Of course, you can't revoke an announcement as easy as a domain, but by removing the inetnum, route(6) and domain objects from the RIPE database this fact is at least documented. So, imho bin 2008-01, 2008-02 and 2006-01 now, get 2007-01 out with proper costs assigned (ARIN membership costs $500 a year, I don't want to discuss in this mail whether it should be higher or lower in the RIPE region and whether there should be a limit of resources assigned to one member) and _then_ (only then) discuss a proper PIv6 proposal that is similar to the other RIRs (e.g. minimum /48 from a certain prefix, requires membership). This can/should be done with PIv4 and ASN as well, but I don't think there is any legal loophole where you could apply it to the already assigned space. Bernhard