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

* Filiz Yilmaz

> On 21 Sep 2013, at 00:03, "Sander Steffann" <sander at steffann.nl>
> wrote:
> 
>> What is your motivation for adding the 'LIR must demonstrate its
>> need for the IPv4 address space' part?
> 
> - Demonstration brings accountability to any claim and makes the
> claim (of confirming the intent of making assignments) believable and
> supported. [This demonstration can be as simple as a couple of
> sentences describing the network and business of the new LIR and does
> not need to come in any specific form or shape.]

Ok, so let's see how this works:

«I have an iMac. I intend to assign it an IPv4 address.»

There. This is the essence of a 100% believable and justified assignment
request, and is all that it takes for a new LIR to in turn justify
receiving the last /22 allocation.

> - Those who intend to lie to the RIPE NCC will be forced to be a bit
> more creative and work on their case harder than just clicking a
> combo box.

Well, I actually have an admission to make - I lied. I don't have an
iMac. I'm more of a PC man, truth to be told. I don't consider myself a
particularly creative man, yet this particular lie came easy.

> Those who really have a need can explain this briefly very
> easily and pass the criteria without any hassle.

«I have a PC. I intend to assign it an IPv4 address.»
«I have a server. I intend to assign it an IPv4 address.»

There. Those would be the God's honest truth.

The point I'm trying to make here is that justifying the single-address
assignment necessary to obtain a last /22 is so trivial that anyone can
do it. Especially anyone who is motivated enough to fork out €3800 in
the pursuit of said /22.

> - RIPE NCC may be able to demonstrate and defend their position why
> they allocated space rightfully way better if they have to one day to
> some I* organisation, having received some demonstration from LIRs.

I do not know what an "I* organisation" is, but this sounds to me to be
the same argument as the Dutch Tax Office point that was brought up by
the NCC, which was been removed from the last IA due to the addition of
the requirement that LIRs confirm their intent to make assignments from
any last /8 allocation.

Keep in mind that the NCC's job is to implement the Community's
bottom-up policies in a neutral and transparent manner. If the Community
says "make a checkbox", and the NCC adds this checkbox, the NCC has no
reason to "defend their position" for doing so and for allocating space
to the members who tick the checkbox.

> The LIR may have chosen to lie and fake their demonstration but the
> RIR will be still have had asked the right questions to consider
> "need" as their justification of who gets the space.

As above, *truthfully* justifying a single IPv4 address is so trivial
that it is not necessary for anyone to lie. But if someone who spends
€3800 on getting a /22 truly has no equipment which could be used to
truthfully justify a single IPv4 address, they could even turn to the
NCC for help:

«I have just ordered free RIPE Atlas probe from
https://atlas.ripe.net/apply (see ticket #1234). I intend to assign it
an IPv4 address.»

In spite of this, if the requesting LIR for whatever reason still
chooses to lie, this is something the NCC can trivially verify - even in
a fully automated fashion. All they need to do is to see whether or not
an inetnum object with status ASSIGNED PA has been registered in the
database some reasonable time after the covering ALLOCATED PA one was.
(The potential for such a check was actually pointed out to me by the
NCC during the preparation of the amendment, it is not my idea.)

> - Adding this may help getting agreement of those who currently
> object the proposal because of the complete removal of justification
> of need from the policy, as it is kept for allocations to new LIRs,
> while it is removed from assignments, which is the real bureaucracy
> on the LIR side. So this looks to me like a compromise between two
> conflicting interests/wishes.

Sorry. This is where you lose me. The 2nd amendment that went into
version 3 of the proposal was added *specifically* to reach a compromise
and an acceptable middle ground for the objections made by yourself and
Malcolm Hutty:

http://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/address-policy-wg/2013-August/008105.html

Note that the check-box in question was actually Malcolm's idea, not
mine. I was really trying to give you (as in you the objectors) exactly
what you wanted here! Also, I took care to CC-ed explicitly on the above
message, because I felt the issue was pretty much the same as the one
you raised in this message:

http://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/address-policy-wg/2013-August/008104.html

In this message, you wrote, and I quote: «I advocate for keeping the
justification for need ***or some kind of commitment from the requester
that the space is to be used on a network shortly and not to be sold to
a 3rd party.***» (emphasis mine)

This kind of "commitment" you proposed here is *exactly* what the
amendment in question implements!

In any case, neither you nor Malcolm chose not to respond to the first
linked-to message containing an initial draft of what became the 2nd
amendment, even though it ended in the explicit question «Would this be
sufficient to remove your concerns?».

So I took it back to the NCC and did some wordsmithing with them to
ensure we ended up with a text that accomplished precisely what I
honestly believed was what you were after. After the completion of this
work, I posted the exact text of the draft amendments to the list, while
the review phase was still open and there was still a window for further
adjustments:

http://www.ripe.net/ripe/mail/archives/address-policy-wg/2013-August/008155.html

...accompanied by an introduction that 1) highlights that your objection
is one of the points attempted to be addressed by the amendment, and 2)
that anyone who would have remaining objections after the amendment
please "speak now or forever hold your peace" so as to avoid not asking
the NCC to spend lots of time and effort on making another useless IA.

You held your peace, Filiz.

I am nonplussed as to why.

If you still objected to the amended proposal, why did you choose to
wait until now with sharing it with the WG? Why didn't you share your
views when they were asked for, when we had a perfect window of
opportunity to further polish the amendments *before* the previous
review period ended?

Best regards,
Tore Anderson