Tore, Your discussion style preference does not suit me too well, I find the divide-concur-corner strategy tiring because simply my preferred style is to keep a more helicopter perspective in such fora. We just differ there. I also find this 1-1 interaction tiring for others to follow, so I will stick to "views" and "thoughts" and so I will outline my views briefly as an attempt to respond to your last post. However I responded in regards to my intentions in the final part below, as you seem to have questions about it too: 1. You seem to be making a joke out of what I have said about demonstration. In my opinion the RIR system is a lot more credible than what you seem to be portraying in your iMac/PC man example. RIRs did a very good job so far on a daily basis getting their guidance from somewhat not so black and white policies that their communities put in place. I think they still do a very good job. Again, just my views... Joke or not, I agree that what you put there is a lot more transparent and has more substance than just a combo box. Clearly any legitimate need is very easy to demonstrate (as you demonstrated in your iMac/PC man example) and new LIRs will only have to do this ONCE, when they request their initial /22, so it is not a huge bureaucratic burden. And since this is so easy to do, why such simple demonstration cannot be kept there in the policy, so this proposal can finally reach consensus? Of course this just a suggestion, I do not know if others who opposed so far will be OK with this small alteration... 2. With some "I* organisation" I meant any organisation that puts Internet in their mission statement and that would be happy to find all kinds of flaws in the RIR practices in accordance for their agenda. So far ITU had seemed to have criticism against RIRs, and RIRs defended their ground having solid practices. I think there might be more than just one, so I did not want to use a specific org name but used an umbrella term as "I* organisation". This concept was covered by Malcomn before so I did not see the need to elaborate in my previous mail. I hope it is clear now. My point was that if the RIPE NCC has a bit more information in regards to need with substance, this may help the RIR system better overall. 3. Agreed, RIPE NCC's job is to implement the Community's bottom-up policies in a neutral and transparent manner. But I also believe (and I have expressed these before too) that the RIPE Community also has a responsibility to develop good policy and provide the RIPE NCC a good policy ground to base their procedures and implementations on. At the end of the day, RIPE NCC is a legal entity, can be sued, can go bust etc etc, and RIPE Community has a huge impact on what they can and cannot do on a daily basis. 4. I am lost too, welcome to the club! Let me explain where I am coming from: Now you have the 3rd version out there and there seems to be still opposition to the removal of justification from what I can tell seeing McTim's and Sylvain's posts. So I thought this could be an easy remedy, adding a supporting sentence in front of the combo-box suggestion to have them agreed on your proposal too, and so I made the wording suggestion. You are free to ignore this suggestion if you still feel too strong about not having it. In the meanwhile I will continue expressing my views and thoughts as I see fit on this list. Note that you made a proposal and the rest of us are discussing it. I have sent more than 10 mails to this thread, trying to explain what I agree with and what I do not and why in great length and to the best of my effort. I've made quotes from previous policy text as well as from your proposal too to explain clearly my views. It was difficult following so many lengthy mails in this thread, also considering that most of it happened during summer vacation time for a lot of people, which was also mentioned by another member on the list. So lets assume everyone is doing their best and lets not target people individually and stick to what is being said and look at the content of the arguments. Otherwise this has the risk of being perceived as really getting out of proportion and beyond the scope of the proposal discussion. Regards Filiz On 21 Sep 2013, at 10:33, Tore Anderson <tore@fud.no> wrote:
* Filiz Yilmaz
On 21 Sep 2013, at 00:03, "Sander Steffann" <sander@steffann.nl> wrote:
What is your motivation for adding the 'LIR must demonstrate its need for the IPv4 address space' part?
- Demonstration brings accountability to any claim and makes the claim (of confirming the intent of making assignments) believable and supported. [This demonstration can be as simple as a couple of sentences describing the network and business of the new LIR and does not need to come in any specific form or shape.]
Ok, so let's see how this works:
«I have an iMac. I intend to assign it an IPv4 address.»
There. This is the essence of a 100% believable and justified assignment request, and is all that it takes for a new LIR to in turn justify receiving the last /22 allocation.
- Those who intend to lie to the RIPE NCC will be forced to be a bit more creative and work on their case harder than just clicking a combo box.
Well, I actually have an admission to make - I lied. I don't have an iMac. I'm more of a PC man, truth to be told. I don't consider myself a particularly creative man, yet this particular lie came easy.
Those who really have a need can explain this briefly very easily and pass the criteria without any hassle.
«I have a PC. I intend to assign it an IPv4 address.» «I have a server. I intend to assign it an IPv4 address.»
There. Those would be the God's honest truth.
The point I'm trying to make here is that justifying the single-address assignment necessary to obtain a last /22 is so trivial that anyone can do it. Especially anyone who is motivated enough to fork out €3800 in the pursuit of said /22.
- RIPE NCC may be able to demonstrate and defend their position why they allocated space rightfully way better if they have to one day to some I* organisation, having received some demonstration from LIRs.
I do not know what an "I* organisation" is, but this sounds to me to be the same argument as the Dutch Tax Office point that was brought up by the NCC, which was been removed from the last IA due to the addition of the requirement that LIRs confirm their intent to make assignments from any last /8 allocation.
Keep in mind that the NCC's job is to implement the Community's bottom-up policies in a neutral and transparent manner. If the Community says "make a checkbox", and the NCC adds this checkbox, the NCC has no reason to "defend their position" for doing so and for allocating space to the members who tick the checkbox.
The LIR may have chosen to lie and fake their demonstration but the RIR will be still have had asked the right questions to consider "need" as their justification of who gets the space.
As above, *truthfully* justifying a single IPv4 address is so trivial that it is not necessary for anyone to lie. But if someone who spends €3800 on getting a /22 truly has no equipment which could be used to truthfully justify a single IPv4 address, they could even turn to the NCC for help:
«I have just ordered free RIPE Atlas probe from https://atlas.ripe.net/apply (see ticket #1234). I intend to assign it an IPv4 address.»
In spite of this, if the requesting LIR for whatever reason still chooses to lie, this is something the NCC can trivially verify - even in a fully automated fashion. All they need to do is to see whether or not an inetnum object with status ASSIGNED PA has been registered in the database some reasonable time after the covering ALLOCATED PA one was. (The potential for such a check was actually pointed out to me by the NCC during the preparation of the amendment, it is not my idea.)
- Adding this may help getting agreement of those who currently object the proposal because of the complete removal of justification of need from the policy, as it is kept for allocations to new LIRs, while it is removed from assignments, which is the real bureaucracy on the LIR side. So this looks to me like a compromise between two conflicting interests/wishes.
Sorry. This is where you lose me. The 2nd amendment that went into version 3 of the proposal was added *specifically* to reach a compromise and an acceptable middle ground for the objections made by yourself and Malcolm Hutty:
http://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/address-policy-wg/2013-August/008105....
Note that the check-box in question was actually Malcolm's idea, not mine. I was really trying to give you (as in you the objectors) exactly what you wanted here! Also, I took care to CC-ed explicitly on the above message, because I felt the issue was pretty much the same as the one you raised in this message:
http://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/address-policy-wg/2013-August/008104....
In this message, you wrote, and I quote: «I advocate for keeping the justification for need ***or some kind of commitment from the requester that the space is to be used on a network shortly and not to be sold to a 3rd party.***» (emphasis mine)
This kind of "commitment" you proposed here is *exactly* what the amendment in question implements!
In any case, neither you nor Malcolm chose not to respond to the first linked-to message containing an initial draft of what became the 2nd amendment, even though it ended in the explicit question «Would this be sufficient to remove your concerns?».
So I took it back to the NCC and did some wordsmithing with them to ensure we ended up with a text that accomplished precisely what I honestly believed was what you were after. After the completion of this work, I posted the exact text of the draft amendments to the list, while the review phase was still open and there was still a window for further adjustments:
http://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/address-policy-wg/2013-August/008155....
...accompanied by an introduction that 1) highlights that your objection is one of the points attempted to be addressed by the amendment, and 2) that anyone who would have remaining objections after the amendment please "speak now or forever hold your peace" so as to avoid not asking the NCC to spend lots of time and effort on making another useless IA.
You held your peace, Filiz.
I am nonplussed as to why.
If you still objected to the amended proposal, why did you choose to wait until now with sharing it with the WG? Why didn't you share your views when they were asked for, when we had a perfect window of opportunity to further polish the amendments *before* the previous review period ended?
Best regards, Tore Anderson