Hi, this discussion feels somewhat familiar, especially the part "we should remove the distinction PA/PI". So I checked my archives, and found someting I wrote at the last round, in July 2009, in the context of "our web hosting shop cannot get IPv6 PI addresses!"... -------------------------- quote -------------------------------------------- I think one of the focal points here is the question on whether 'giving a hosted web server an IP address' is 'assigning address space to end users'. The boundary cases ("the customer has a virtual web presence and not even a dedicated IP address" and "the customer is running their own web farm and the ISP routes a /24 towards their firewall") are pretty clear - but there is lots of space for different way to do web server hosting in between (managed servers, rented servers, real servers, vmware entities, vserver/jailed virtual servers, ...) [...] People have argued to remove the PA/PI distinction. I don't think that this is the right way (due to the fact that PA allocations necessarily need to be more liberal than PI assignments), but maybe we need to loosen up PI rules a bit, as in: "Using addresses from a PI block to number other parties' devices is permitted as long as these devices are connected to the same network, documentation about the usage can be presented to the RIPE NCC, and full responsibility for the addresses (abuse handling etc) is done by the PI holder". (After all, one of the reasons why we document end user assignments in a public database is to be able to contact a person feeling responsible for troubleshooting and abuse handling) "same network" is important to make it crystal clear that "get a chunk of PI and sell off smaller bits to 3rd parties connecting at random to other ISPs" is not the desired intention. -------------------------- quote -------------------------------------------- At that time, there was one voice agreeing with me, a few more comments, and then the thread sort of died. Looking at the text today, I think it fits the "hosting provider issue" quite well. It does allow loopholes for "large-scale end user access" ISPs (those that use IPv4 PI for single-address-end-user connections today), so we might need to think a bit more about the concept and the goals, before agreeing on specific wording. Some food for tomorrow's discussion. Gert Doering -- APWG chair -- Total number of prefixes smaller than registry allocations: 150584 SpaceNet AG Vorstand: Sebastian v. Bomhard Joseph-Dollinger-Bogen 14 Aufsichtsratsvors.: A. Grundner-Culemann D-80807 Muenchen HRB: 136055 (AG Muenchen) Tel: +49 (89) 32356-444 USt-IdNr.: DE813185279