I will therefor return the policy to the review phase, for further discussion on the mailing-list and on the upcoming RIPE meeting.
My company supports this proposal moving forward. On the one hand as a large network operator we have the need to deploy hierarchy in our IPv4 networks and thus the HD ratio is a fairer way of measuring addresses used, i.e. locked up by the network architecture. While it is possible to mitigate this by carrying lots of small prefixes internally, this creates unacceptable scaling issues of its own. The HD ratio policy, submitted by Alain Bidron, strikes a balance between these issues. Of course, some have noted that this will cause a small reduction in the overall lifetime of IPv4 addresses and feel that this will penalize emerging regions. We do not believe this is so, since there are still many years left for emerging regions to acquire IPv4 addresses and build infrastructure. At the same time, IPv6 has matured as a technology and presents the emerging regions with an opportunity to leapfrog over developed countries. By doing this they will have no dependency on IPv4 addresses nor will they need to deal with the complexities that have been grafted onto IPv4 over the years. I note that in Asia, the takeup of IPv6 has been quite a bit stronger than in most of the developed world. My company, and many of the companies supporting this proposal, operate IPv6 networks as well.
As a side note the matter of how RIPE should relate to other organizations in our policy making process I would like to make the following remark;
RIPE policy is made by individual contributions to mailing lists and at RIPE meetings. Not by meetings of other organizations. Our discussions should be based on technical arguments in the relevant RIPE fora.
I agree and I strongly urge Alain to go back to the members of ETNO who drafted Expert Contribution 064 http://www.etno.be/Portals/34/ETNO%20Documents/Information%20Society%20i2010... and get them to come to this mailing list and explain the reasons behind their support of this policy proposal. --Michael Dillon