[address-policy-wg] 2005-08 New Policy Proposal

> The answer is "the RIPE policies have no answers how to do things that
> are in violation of the RIPE policies" - and assigning 10 IPv6 addresses 

> is against the policy.

Assigning 10 IPv6 addresses is *NOT* against RIPE policy!

It may come as a surprise to those of you who do not speak
English as a native language, but the word "assign" is a
synonym of the word "allocate" and both have a very general
meaning of distributing something to multiple recipients.
The fact that RIR policies use these synonyms in specific and
distinct ways does not change the fact that anyone who learns
English as a language of communication will learn that these
two words mean the same thing and can be substituted for one
another.

Even worse (Horrors!) these two words can be used in business
outside of the context of the RIRs. ISPs can allocate circuit
bandwidth to customers, assign them to router ports, distribute
IP addresses to them, etc.

Inside the business he can certainly assign 10 addresses to
his customer, however the very fact that he is choosing to
allocate the customer 10 addresses shows that he is doing 
a private act. Since it is a private act, we don't want to
know that he distributed 10 addresses to this customer and
therefore, the allotment of 10 addresses does not need to
be registered in the RIPE database. If he had given out an
entire /64 to the customer we still don't need to see this
apportionment in the database. The addresses designated for
a customer only need to be seen in the database when the
act of earmarking these addresses for customer use is in
alignment with the RIPE policy. Presumably, at a technical
level, if there is no route created in the service provider's
OSPF or ISIS then it doesn't need to be published. But don't
take my word for that because I really don't understand what
RPE-267 3.3 says.

> The policy is a bit vague here, admitted.

I agree.

--Michael Dillon