[address-policy-wg] Discrepancy Between RIPE Policies on IPv4 and IPv6 Provider Independent (PI) Address Space

> What would then be the difference between PI and PA 
> addresses? Do you think we should get rid of that distinction 
> completely, or is this not what you mean? I heard people talk 
> about the distinction here at the RIPE meeting in Prague, so 
> it seems to be a topic of discussion.

The difference has nothing to do with the English words provider,
aggregatable, and independent. They are meaningless. The difference has
nothing to do with LIRs, votings rights, fees, etc. It has nothing to do
with ASNs or Autonomous Systems. This is all meanlingless jargon unless
you are initiated into the secret society of the RIR (Respublica
Iconoscentorum Regurgitentorum).

It is simple. A PA block is used to carve out smaller blocks which are
delegated to other organizations, who then manage those smaller blocks.
A PI block is managed by the recipient of the RIPE allocation.

A PA block goes to an organization whose core business is about GROWING
the network by connecting other autonomous networks. They delegate
blocks to those networks and provide connectivity to them. That is all.

A PI block goes to an organization who manages a network which can also
contain portions that are not owned by the organization, but which are
managed on behalf of other organizations. The typical example is the
data centre operator who rents a room to someone who rents a rack to
someone who rents a server to someone who rents a VPS to someone who
rents a website (or ecommerce storefront) to someone. That is 6 steps
removed from the RIPE relationship, but the PI recipient still manages
all the IP addressing for all of these layers of organizations. And
there might be only one layer too.

For RIPE, the main thing is that companies whose core business concerns
network growth, want to be involved in IP addressing policy because they
understand how important it is to their business. There is an old story,
which I first heard in a Japanese version, but here is a link to a short
English rhyming poem called "For the want of a nail"
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Want_of_a_Nail_%28proverb%29>
IP networks are very much like that because you can invest huge sums of
money running fibre to another country, buying a building, fitting it
with racks and power and air conditioning, buying and installing
routers. But when it comes time to turn it on and start moving packets,
if you haven't got one of those free IP addresses to use on the devices,
your entire investment could be lost.

I'm sure that many of you have run into situations where you were called
in to help with a customer problem that was escalated to a high
executive level, and the root cause of the problem was that people were
not paying attention to IP address supply, and never looked for an
address until the last minute. Then, when they discovered that the
spreadsheet they had been using for the last two years had no spare
addresses, they were lost because nobody could remember how to get more
adresses to replenish the spreadsheet. I've had this experience in more
than one company.

The IP address supply chain is of great interest to people with PA
blocks, because they struggle to manage it internally, and need to know
that there is some stability of supply. They want to maintain
relationshops with all the other large consumers of addresses and keep
tabs on them. But organizations with PI blocks have it relatively
simple, partly because they are smaller businesses, partly because they
don't grow as quickly and have more control over the speed of growth. A
PI organization is generally satisfied with the two-party relationship
that they have with RIPE.

In a sense, the PI recipient is rather like one of those organizations
that receives an IP address delegation from a PA recipient. But they
want to maintain separate suppliers for their network access supply
chain and their IP addressing supply chain.

--Michael Dillon