[address-policy-wg] Proposal 2011-02 moving to Last Call

On 23/09/2011 14:38, Sander Steffann wrote:
> I know, but that would change the IPv6 PI policy into a judgement call
> by an IPRA. That would make the policy unimplementable. The information
> would still be interesting though, which is why I suggest to the RIPE
> NCC that they ask for it anyway. It's just a suggestion. We don't tell
> the NCC how to implement policy, but we can suggest :-)

I admit that drawing the line between policy and implementation is a
difficult issue, and that there are tensions between the two requirements.
 On the one hand, IPRAs get quite vague policies from ap-wg and would often
like more clarity because they have a job to do and interpreting policy can
sometimes be difficult.  On the other hand, ap-wg tends to prefer to
prescribe general principles and let the IPRAs do what seems sensible
because they don't always have a clear picture of exactly the sort of
requests that the IPRAs have to deal with.  Hey, you can't legislate for
every eventuality.

Enough philosophy.

There are two things that concern me here:

1. in this situation, I made a suggestion to add something to the policy
and the proposers didn't put it into the policy and that's fine (I'm not
hung up on 2011-02 and really want to see some form of IPv6 PI appear soon,
and I'm particularly not hung up on the suggestion I made).  However,
someone blinked and now it's implicitly a part of the policy even though it
wasn't part of the policy before.

2. if interpretation is implicitly added to a policy without it being
explicitly stated, then the APWG is creating an expectation that the RIPE
NCC will listen to this interpretation.  I don't agree that it's just a
suggestion: if there was no expectation that the NCC wasn't going to listen
to it, the suggestion wouldn't have been made in the first place.

Look, I really don't want to make this sound like bureaucratic ant abuse,
but something has effectively been added to the policy outside the terms of
the PDP and there is a problem with this.  This is not a 2011-02 problem,
but a PDP problem.

Let's go ahead with 2011-02 as originally stated in the policy proposal -
without the extra interpretation.

Nick