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

> Simply, PI to network topological leaves doesn't scale.

On the contrary, PI *DOES* scale and it has scaled because
there is no direct one-to-one connection between issuing a
PI assignment and consuming a global routing table slot.

Far more worrisome is the practice of issuing multiple 
non-aggregatable blocks to a single AS and the tendency
of some ASes to use multiple global routing table slots
for traffic engineering. Those things have greater impact
on global routing table size than the number of new PI
blocks.

In addition, there is no consensus that the global routing
table is becoming too big for providers to cope. If there was
an imminent problem, then network operators would be meeting
in public forums to define the scope of the problem and to
agree on actions to mitigate the problem. If that were happening
then RIPE could leverage the existence of this consortium of
network operators to incorporate global routing table issues 
into its policies.

But since this hypothetical consortium does not currently exist,
RIPE can find nobody to take responsibility for global routing 
table impact and therefore cannot include global routing table
size in its policies.

--Michael Dillon