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

Hi,

this discussion feels somewhat familiar, especially the part "we should
remove the distinction PA/PI".  So I checked my archives, and found
someting I wrote at the last round, in July 2009, in the context of
"our web hosting shop cannot get IPv6 PI addresses!"...

-------------------------- quote --------------------------------------------
I think one of the focal points here is the question on whether 'giving
a hosted web server an IP address' is 'assigning address space to end
users'.

The boundary cases ("the customer has a virtual web presence and not
even a dedicated IP address" and "the customer is running their own web
farm and the ISP routes a /24 towards their firewall") are pretty clear
- but there is lots of space for different way to do web server hosting
in between (managed servers, rented servers, real servers, vmware
entities, vserver/jailed virtual servers, ...)

[...]

People have argued to remove the PA/PI distinction.  I don't think that
this is the right way (due to the fact that PA allocations necessarily need
to be more liberal than PI assignments), but maybe we need to loosen up
PI rules a bit, as in:

 "Using addresses from a PI block to number other parties' devices is
  permitted as long as these devices are connected to the same network,
  documentation about the usage can be presented to the RIPE NCC, and
  full responsibility for the addresses (abuse handling etc) is done by
  the PI holder".


(After all, one of the reasons why we document end user assignments in a
public database is to be able to contact a person feeling responsible for
troubleshooting and abuse handling)

"same network" is important to make it crystal clear that "get a chunk
of PI and sell off smaller bits to 3rd parties connecting at random to
other ISPs" is not the desired intention.
-------------------------- quote --------------------------------------------

At that time, there was one voice agreeing with me, a few more comments,
and then the thread sort of died.

Looking at the text today, I think it fits the "hosting provider issue"
quite well.  It does allow loopholes for "large-scale end user access"
ISPs (those that use IPv4 PI for single-address-end-user connections 
today), so we might need to think a bit more about the concept and the 
goals, before agreeing on specific wording.

Some food for tomorrow's discussion.

Gert Doering
        -- APWG chair
-- 
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