[address-policy-wg] 2015-04 New Policy Proposal (RIPE Resource Transfer Policies)

> You can find the full proposal at:
> 
>     https://www.ripe.net/participate/policies/proposals/2015-04

first of all, a large thank-you for handling this policy aggregation.  This
will make things a lot easier for organisations to understand how RIPE
transfer policy works.  Although policy reworking like this is completely
thankless, it's important to do.

I've gone down through the new policy and compared it against the old.  As
expected, there is plenty of optimisation going on, but optimisation means
changes and changes mean that we need to understand what's been changed.

Enumerating some of the changes:

"Resources are excluded from transfers when RIPE Policies mandate their
return to the RIPE NCC.":  this is completely new text.  approve.

ipv6 transfer policy: added "Transfers must be reflected in the RIPE
Database. Transfers can be on a permanent or non-permanent basis.".  approve.

ipv6 transfer policy: removed "The block that is to be re-allocated must
not be smaller than the minimum allocation size at the time of
re-allocation".  for the record, this is an interesting consequence of
section 2.1, paragraph 3.  I.e. no point in repeating policy that already
exists.

asn transfer policy: added "scarce resources ... cannot be transferred by
the resource holder within 24 months".  I don't disagree with this, nor
with the genericisation of this transfer restriction.

all policies: the tightening of the policy text in section 2.1 concerning
who's currently responsible for the resource ("the original resource holder
... policies are applied") is good.

asn + ipv6 policies: added statement that ripe policies apply for the
duration of transfer and during the transfer process itself - to align with
the ipv4 policy.  This is good, but other RIRs may claim that their
policies apply during the transfer process.  Would it be worth discussing
at a higher level whether there should be a global policy for which RIR
policy applies during the transfer process?

all policies: "Resources are excluded from transfers when RIPE Policies
mandate their return to the RIPE NCC".  Mmm.  I'd be careful about
inserting something like this.  Can you explain the intention and the
meaning of this clause?

all policies: removed statement about publishing stats on non-approved
transfers.  Whoa, what's going on here?  Not ok.

Nick