I wasn't at the RIPE meeting, but I do have at least one big concern based on what I heard.

To be precise, I proposed the following:

- any LIR that is established (has done all the paperwork, paid their fees, and whatnot) and can document the need for one IPv6 address can get a /32. No further justification required.

Does this mean end sites, those that are not transit providers become eligible for a /32? In other words, what is to prevent a land grab on what will largely be perceived as PI IPv6 address blocks? (I heard from someone who was at the meeting that the answer was a clear yes, end sites will be eligible.) I think we would be sending entirely the wrong message if end sites are able to get /32s. Note also that my main concern has much less to do with utilization or how much address space we have (we do have a lot). It has much more to do with having registry policies that are supportive of aggregation of routing information in the long term. This will only happen if most end sites get address space from their providers. Allowing end sites to get big allocations now, will cause nothing but problems later. It risks replaying some of the bad history of IPv4.

- to avoid a horrible mistake, every region is permitted to allow only assigment of 2000 /32s per region. So the maximum wastage is 6000 /32s (out of 500 million /32s in the 1/8th of the space we're talking about), and 6000 additional routes. After that, we're going to reconsider policy.

And once we have 6000 such /32s allocated, then what? We replay the haves vs. the have nots? Won't there be a lot of pressure then to continue giving out /32s freely, since current router technology supports more than 6K routes, etc.? What makes you think we'll be able to put in more conservative policies at this point?

- why are we putting criteria there? To keep out "some that we do not want". Conservation is not an issue. Routing table growth might be influenced by this, or might be not, we don't know.

Having RIR policies that make it harder to have good aggregatability of routes should not be done rashly. It is far easier to take steps now that limit potential problems, than try to reverse poor decisions after the fact.

- do we want major national research networks connecting something like "50 universities"? YES

So, can we come up with alternate criteria that support giving /32s to such entities that doesn't also allow just anyone to get a /32? This desire seems reasonable to me. But the proposed solution seems to gone way beyond what was needed, and has some real down sides.

Who are the ones that we want to keep out anyway? Why? To achieve what?

End sites. If every end site gets its own /32, we will have another routing disaster. So much for IPv6 learning from the IPv4 experience. Thomas