[address-policy-wg] 2012-02 New Draft Document and Impact Analysis Published (Policy for Inter-RIR Transfers of IPv4 Address Space)

> https://www.ripe.net/ripe/policies/proposals/2012-02

Back in December, I suggested that the wording be changed from «LIRs» to
something more generic. The rationale was that if the policy explicitly
refers to LIRs only, this will prevent inter-region transfers of PI
address space held by non-LIRs, even if the IPv4 policy is amended to
allow for in-region transfers of PI addresses.

The proposer responded: «I am quite willing to change the wording from
LIR's to Organizations if all agree». I saw no objections, but version
2.0 still refers to LIRs specifically. So I'd still like to see this
changed.

That said...

I support the idea of allowing inter-region transfers in general as long
as the marginal cost of doing so is reasonably low, so I feel a bit bad
about this, but: I do *not* support this proposal.

The reason for this is that inter-region transfers are being used as an
argument against proposal 2013-03, see:

http://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/address-policy-wg/2013-March/007757.html

My view is that if the cost of allowing for inter-region transfers
(specifically in a way that is compatible with ARIN's policy) is to
uphold the need bureaucracy and operational overhead relating to
assignments for all RIPE region LIRs, then the marginal cost is not
reasonably low, but unacceptably high. If it's an either/or situation
between 2012-02 and 2013-03, I'm firmly in the 2013-03 camp. I elaborate
on why here:

http://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/address-policy-wg/2013-March/007764.html

This issue might be resolved by having 2012-02 add some text that
upholds the need principle for transfers coming in from regions that
demand it (read: ARIN), or for the recipient LIRs of such transfers
overall. I have no suggestion on exactly how this text could look like,
I'm afraid. I suspect the proposer would have to discuss it with ARIN
staff in order to get confirmation that any proposed text does indeed
satisfy their definition of «needs-based general number resource policies».

Tore