[address-policy-wg] PA policy

* Kennedy, James

> I raised the question as I've heard several community members
> complain, validly IMO, about some LIRs that have accumulated vast v4
> PA allocations that are technically autonomous to the LIR. Seems
> strange to have been allowed, especially considering the market value
> on these resources now. 

Consider the following use case: A government (national, regional,
local - doesn't matter) sets up an LIR in order to provide addresses to
its various branches, offices, schools, whatever. The goverment doesn't
run an ISP of their own (they probably used to run a telco at some
point, but that was privatised), so the LIR does not provide any
connectivity to anyone - so that's up to the branches, offices, schools
to put out public tenders for and obtain from a local or national ISP.
The reason for having the government LIR in the first place, is to
prevent the use of ISP-owned addresses and the lock-in effect that
results in (on the local level, the techies might not be knowledgeable
enough to avoid that from the beginning, and certainly asking every
school to run their own LIR would be a non-starter). Finally, having
the entire government in one (or a few) nicely aggregated block gives
significant technical benefits. The government LIR might also charge a
fee to its downstream clients, just to aid a little with garbage
collection and ensure the LIR hostmaster(s) get paid.

Or mentally replace "government" with some kind of large and
distributed enterprise or group of companies. The umbrella corporation
could provide LIR services to a number of sub-companies.

That's a valid use-case we'd like to make sure is allowed, agreed? And
it has been been allowed since before I got involved in this WG at
least. However, if you look at it, it's not very easy to distinguish
between my example government LIR and the "IP leasing LIR" you think
it's strange that has been allowed. Technically, they're doing exactly
the same thing. So both are allowed.

Anyway. The vultures will fight over IPv4's carcass. That's natural,
and unavoidable - just let them. I for one am glad that this community
hasn't succumbed to the temptation to create more and more draconian
and restrictive policies, all in the name of wringing some extra short
term life span out of IPv4. Had we done so, I believe we'd be causing
ourselves more long term damage than short term benefit - such policies
would inevitably get in the way of regular folks running their business
in a regular way, the (participating member of) RIPE community and its
policies end up losing legitimacy for the larger community we're
supposed to serve.

Tore