[address-policy-wg] Reopening discussion on RIPE Policy Proposal 2006-05

On 16/07/2009 22:33, Marco Hogewoning wrote:
> This is a bad proposal, completely going into the wrong direction and I
> won't support it, it should have been dropped years ago instead of
> keeping it sleeping.

To be fair, this is a one-sided viewpoint.  The reality is that the current 
policies cause people to lie on their PI application forms in order to 
justify a /24.

The reason for this is simple.  At a certain stage in their existence, many 
businesses realise that single-homing using PA address space can cause 
serious business continuity problems.  If your single upstream has an 
outage, your site will go down and your money will stop coming in.  If you 
want diversity through multiple providers, you can forget about it.  But 
more importantly, there is a supplier lock-in associated with using your 
upstream's PA address space: if you decide to renumber to another address 
block, then this renumbering process is going to cost money, and if it's 
not done very carefully, it can also cause loss of revenue.  So, when your 
connectivity provider starts acting the maggot, they can do so with a 
certain degree of impunity - and this degree has a discrete financial value 
associated with it.

Provider independent addressing also puts the balance of negotiating power 
in the hands of the customer, rather than the provider.  If they don't like 
the pricing, they can just go elsewhere and hey, it's really easy.

All these things are serious and legitimate concerns for small businesses.

So, if you're one of these businesses which depends on good quality, 
diverse upstream connectivity, but only have a requirement for relatively 
small numbers of addresses (for whatever reason - there can be many, 
ranging from frugality to low interface count), you have three choices for 
dealing with your business continuity requirements:

1. get a < /24 address block from the RIPE NCC and then discover that this 
is completely useless,
2. lie to RIPE NCC about your addressing requirements and get yourself a 
/24, or
3. continue to build your business on the basis of a continuing good 
relationship with a single upstream provider, and hope that this 
relationship does not deteriorate to the extent that the cost of continuing 
in this relationship does not exceed the cost of renumbering out of that 
address block and severing ties with that provider.

I'm not attempting to justify any of these positions or say that a minimum 
assignment size of /24 is an elegant solution to this problem.  All I'm 
saying is that they are simply the reality for many small businesses, and 
that continuing to stick our collective heads in the sand about this isn't 
going to change the reality.

The result of this is that -- according to the prefixlen stats for PI 
assignments provided by the NCC which indicate that hardly anyone applies 
for < /24, and that the vast majority of assignments are for exactly /24 -- 
people are quite clearly making a wholesale mockery of the address 
assignment RIPE policies by consistently and wholeheartedly lying though 
their teeth on their application forms.

This is, in my opinion, a much worse situation than compromising on a 
minimum assignment size of /24.

I also note that most of the people complaining about proposal work with 
large organisations which are unaffected by the restrictions and 
workarounds that that 2006-05 attempts to solve.

Nick