[address-policy-wg] Policy proposal 2009-01

On Thu, 2010-04-15 at 10:45 -0400, John Curran wrote:

>  The RIPE 2009-1/ARIN 2009-3 global policy proposal has also provisions 
>  which provide for a clear process for reallocation of recovered address 
>  space returned to the IANA, and these aspects of the global policy are
>  quite likely useful independent of the policy as a "statement" of unity
>  about returning recovered address space.  

This is indeed true, but would be a side-effect of the policy. And I'm
not sure if IANA would feel bound by any policy that was not global.
 
>  It's important to note that the term "recovered address space" includes 
>  both voluntarily returned space as well as space reclaimed due to legal 
>  action or abuse determination, and hence it's not unreasonable to think
>  that there will be resources put into the recovered address space pool
>  if this policy is globally adopted (even in the absence of voluntarily
>  returned space).

Agreed.

>  The ARIN community identified that the decision to return recovered
>  address space to the IANA is a local (not global) policy decision. 
>  ARIN's present practice has been to return to the IANA any significant 
>  address space which was voluntarily returned to ARIN (for examples, 
>  see the following writeup: 
>  <http://blog.icann.org/2008/02/recovering-ipv4-address-space/>) 
>  and until  a new ARIN policy is established, we will continue that 
>  practice.

Excellent... and plaudits to ARIN for their selfless behaviour, modulo,
of course, any definition of what constitutes "significant".
 
>  If the other regions adopt their respective policy proposals, we will 
>  have an outcome operationally very similar to the original proposal, 
>  but with regional policy control over what gets returned to IANA.  As 
>  you note, that fails as a unified statement of greater good, but each
>  region should also consider if the resulting global policy would result 
>  in a useful outcome despite this failing.

The problem is, of course, that this policy was proposed as a global
policy and what I am trying to do here is tidy things up in the RIPE
region. I'm perfectly open to the idea that we have individual regional
policies, but this would surely require us to start the process again
with new regional (as opposed to global) policies? Also, of course, the
note above about regional policies possibly not being binding on IANA
still stands.

Nigel
Chairman RIPE NCC Board