[address-policy-wg] 2017-03 New Policy Proposal (Reducing Initial IPv4 Allocation, aiming to preserve a minimum of IPv4 space)

> The rationale for this is to make RIR-allocated ipv4 address space
> string out a bit longer by raising the price and dropping the size.

did it say anything about price?  i missed that?  i did not think the AP
WG dealt with pricing; so it would be pretty strange.

> It is not convincing to state that allocating /22s instead of /24s is an
> abrogation of responsibility, and as a community we should step back
> from this sort of overly dramatic language.

in an american dictionary, 'abrogation' ranges from lack of awareness to
more intentional acts.  in this proposal, it was used in relation to
the occasional proposal to encourage ipv4 runout to promote ipv6, which
should be able to sell on it's own merits, not schadenfreude

> A more sober viewpoint is that any future decision about tweaking the
> balance between allocation size and anticipated run-out time is not
> much more than an exercise in deck-chair rearrangement.  It's a
> deck-chair rearrangement because the ship is going down and nothing
> can stop it.

agreed.  but we can postpone the inevitable so folk have time to get in
the lifeboats.  and if we can, as stewards, we have a responsibility to
do so.

> The proposal fails to mention the windfall that will ensue for existing
> address holders as the baseline RIR price for IPv4 addresses will
> increase from around €4.70 to nearly €19.

truth is, i have not modeled what might happen to the ipv4 market.

> there are quite a few people in this WG who would be happy with this
> sort of change, both brokers and incumbent address holders.

and they are evil so should not allowed to be happy?  :)

> Because of this, we also need to consider as a community what part
> self-interested financial motivation is going to play in terms of
> whether people are going to support this proposal or not, and how
> compatible this is with good governance of the policy-making mechanism
> for global resource allocation.

i am not sure that the community remains sober enough to do so without
getting nasty.  i would how so, but my faith wavers.

> If, as this proposal suggests, we move from a minimum routable range
> of /24 to /25 or longer, this is a change that comes at a cost in
> terms of reducing the lifetime of any routing device on the internet
> which takes a full dfz.

indeed.  but i see it as inevitable as the need to bridge becomes more
and more intense.  so do we want to do it in a controlled and managed
fashion or chaotically?

randy