[address-policy-wg] 2006-05 New Policy Proposal (PI Assignment Size)

> Nobody is aiming to exclude people from participating in the Internet,
> but PI isn't the *only* way.

IP addresses (PA and PI) are not just used for the Internet.
Many IP address blocks are only used on IP internetworks 
that are not part of the public Internet. Some of these
internetworks allow limited traffic exchange with the public
Internet through NAT gateways. Others allow no traffic 
interchange at all and enforce this with firewalls in case
participants fail to maintain the air gap between their
Internet connections and the other internetwork.

Most of these IP address blocks, PI and PA, are not
used by a military organization. They tend to be used
by business federations and by companies providing a
business service to customers over a non-public
internetwork.

RFC 2050 paragraph 3(a) specifically allows for IP address
allocations/assignments to these non-Internet uses. When RIPE
is making policy about IP address use, we should be careful
to not be Internet-centric because that could be interpreted
as anti-competition. Companies can justify PI assignments or
PA allocations/assignments independently of whether they intend
to connect to the public Internet.

As far as participating in the Internet, not all organizations
necessarily want 100% global connectivity. In particular,
organizations in countries with a non-colonial language may
only want connectivity to a few countries which they consider
to be their "community" or their "market". For the record,
colonial languages are those like English, French, Spanish, 
and Russian which are widely used outside of their area of
origin due to a previous history as the language of empire.
You can understand that a business who markets services in
Hungarian might only want connectivity to Hungary, Rumania,
Austria, Slovakia, and Ukraine where there is a population
of Hungarian native speakers. They might do this by buying
connectivity to multiple local ISPs in this region and asking
those ISPs to not forward their announced route(s).

That is a valid use of a PI assignment for multihoming that
does not result in the use of a slot in the global routing
table. 

--Michael Dillon
P.S. my choice of Hungarian was entirely random. The same thing
applies for languages like Catalan, Italian, Albanian, German, etc.