[address-policy-wg] 2019-02 New Policy Proposal (Reducing IPv4 Allocations to a /24)

On 2/8/19 5:34 PM, Corin Langosch wrote:
> What's the difference between receiving an allocation from RIPE (=
> renting IPs from RIPE) and getting an allocation of storage space from
> some provider (= renting storage space)?

The main difference is in responsibility of tax payment. Once RIPE will
"sell services" with payment diferenciation based od ammount of assets
held by each member, taxation will be based od laws valid in one
specific country based on HQ location. This is my simplification (I'm
not a lawyer), but this was discussed in deep in past - and all relevant
mailing-list archives are public.... so if you're interested, you can
deep dive into these past discussions - there's no reason to raise them
again... I don't see reason to repeat such discussion.
	

>> What you are describing is "sale of goods" - and that is a problem
>> because it would make the addresses the NCC has in stock a taxable
>> asset.
> 
> 10.2 of ripe-673 states that allocations are not granting any
> ownership, thus RIPE is not selling anything but only granting usage.
> Just like a hosting provider can lend storage space. Imo IPs are
> already a taxable asset (as are the disks of the hosting provider) just
> because of the IP market created by RIPE. So closing the IP market and
> replacing it with a financial model which more or less forces companies
> to return unused (or otherwise wasted) IPs would be the way to go.

IP market is not created *only* by RIPE. There're other RIRs, with their
own policies.. and also legacy resource holders having their allocations
before RIRs scheme were introduced. And of course, legacy resource
holders (holding "class A / class B") ranges can sell their assets
independently on some RIR policy... this market is more complicated.

And also current RIPE policies doesn't break ability to earn more than
one allocation (currently limited to /22) to single real entity
(represented by multiple legal persons). It's happening already in large
scale. In this perspective, limiting new allocations only to /24 (as
proposed by 2019-02) introduces additional complication to these
"speculative" members violating current policy spirit... simply by
making their approach harder to implement.

- Daniel