[address-policy-wg] 2013-03 New Draft Document and Impact Analysis Published (No Need - Post-Depletion Reality Adjustment and Clean up)

On 01/08/2013 18:27, Tore Anderson wrote:
> Well *that* is the million dollar question, isn't it. In a state of
> scarcity, what is "fair"?

honestly, I have no idea.

> Therefore I was hoping that retaining this sentence (which is there in
> today's policy as well) would help move the discussion forward in the
> direction of consensus.

There is a balance in the current policy, which states fairness as an
objective and then effectively defines the term as assignment by stated
requirement.  In the environment of plenty, there was broad consensus that
stated requirement was probably a pretty reasonable way of handling address
assignment and there were credible reasons to assign the term "fair" to it.
 No-one ever believed that it was perfect, but it worked well enough.

We're no longer in that world: stated requirement will probably no longer
work as a reassignment mechanism so we're currently thinking that maybe an
open market is the best way to handle future ip assignment requirements.
Is this fair?  I don't think so, but I don't think it's unfair either.
Probably it's unrelated to the concept of fairness.

But at least we know where we stand: transfers are the business of the
transferer and transferee and the RIPE NCC will merely keep a record of the
old and new holders.

>From this point of view, I think the policy proposal would not benefit from
a statement declaring that fairness is a policy objective, because it
isn't.  If we pretend it is, then we are not being honest with ourselves.

Nick