[address-policy-wg] 2013-06 New Policy Proposal (PA/PI Unification IPv6 Address Space)

Hi everyone,

I am one of the three volunteers working on this 'big IPv6 revolution 
thing' for the past three months :-)

The first main change that I had in my mind when offering to join the 
editorial team was that there were a lot of artificial rules attached to 
the policy and these rules were restricting the IPv6 deployment (in my 
view).
Using PI came with a lot of restrains. You could only use it for your 
own infrastructure and not to offer any kind of services (other than 
SaaS) to your customers. That is because of two paragraphs in the (still 
current) policy.
One of the paragraphs was saying that the minimum that can be used in 
IPv6 (even for a p2p link) is a /64.
Second paragraph was saying that PI can not be further assigned.
Therefore, with current policy in place, even if you have a customer 
that needs one IPv6 address for SSL, you can not offer that service to 
the customer without violating the policy (one of the two paragraphs above).


Second main change is that we have removed the difference between PA and 
PI. IP addresses are now blocks of addresses and these can be allocated 
by the RIPE NCC to the LIR or to the End User (via Sponsoring LIR). The 
minimum that can be requested from the RIPE NCC is a /32 (except some 
special cases).
We had the whole PA/PI colour 'thing' which was not visible anywhere 
else but in the RIPE Database; your equipment, routers, peers could not 
see whether you are using PI or PA.


Third main change is removing the differences between assignments and 
allocations. Just like with the removal of the PI/PA differences; 
assignments and allocations were also different colours of the same 
blocks of IPs. Basically, anyone holding an allocation from the RIPE NCC 
can sub-allocate a block to either an end-site or to an other customer. 
The number of sub-allocation levels becomes infinite.
We've made this change because we had a few examples where the policy 
may have been violated even without knowledge. One of the examples where 
this fixes a problem is when I would receive a /48 assignment from my 
provider and would allow my cousin to use a /64 for his web server.


Last change: all the IPv6 documents have been merged into one single 
policy document :)

Regards,
Elvis


On 9/26/13 7:11 PM, Gert Doering wrote:
> Dear AP WG,
>
> On Thu, Sep 26, 2013 at 04:36:24PM +0200, Marco Schmidt wrote:
>> You can find the full proposal at:
>>
>>      https://www.ripe.net/ripe/policies/proposals/2013-06
>
> This is "the big IPv6 revolution thing" I promised you somewhat over two
> years ago :-) - unification of PA and PI into "just numbers, no colours".
>
> As I never found time to actually write the specific policy document, it
> stalled, until these three brave volunteers took over and spent *quite*
> some amount of discussion and word-smithing to come up with what should
> be a much easier and cleaner IPv6 policy, without changing the underlying
> spirit ("who needs addresses gets some"), but removing some of the
> artificial strings ("addresses of this colour must not be used to do X,
> for that, you need more expensive ones").
>
> It's a big change, and it's radical, but it's what you asked for when
> being presented with the idea :-)
>
> Gert Doering
>          -- APWG chair
>