[anti-abuse-wg] Allocation of number resources

In message <0C2184CC-2791-48C2-894C-C13E620BFE73 at ripe.net>, 
Alex Le Heux <alexlh at ripe.net> wrote:

>The RIPE Community's policies generally do not contain highly specific
>requirements such as minimum amounts of hardware and direct the RIPE NCC
>to allocate address space to LIRs at the rate that the addresses are
>assigned and/or sub-allocated to end-users by that LIR.
>
>In early 2011 a new LIR would receive as a first allocation the minimum
>allocation size, a /21, unless the LIR could demonstrate a need for a
>larger block. Such a need could be demonstrated in various ways, with
>proof of purchase of the right amount of hardware to deploy these
>addresses on being an obvious and often used one. Other ways to
>demonstrate a need include operating licenses granted by governments,
>contracts with providers, customers and/or partners and detailed
>deployment plans.
>
>Subsequent allocations are evaluated in a large part on the usage rate
>of previous allocations. Should an LIR have requested a much larger size
>additional allocation than their previous usage rate would indicate,
>additional documentation of their need would be requested.

I appreciate you taking the time to write the above answer, however I'm
afraid that it has left me a bit confused.

On the one hand, you say that "RIPE Community's policies generally do not
contain highly specific requirements" with respect to justifying allocations,
but then you go on to describe various ways that an LIR might actually
justify it's alleged need.

>An allocation to an LIR is a block that is reserved for future use of
>that LIR, its size based on past usage rate and/or specified future
>plans. Most LIR's businesses, however, are dynamic: Customers come and
>go, projects change, get cancelled and new projects get started. The
>RIPE policies take this into account and there is no requirement to keep
>some arbitrary minimum amount of hardware infrastructure.

So let me see if I understand this.

If a given LIR had a spare /17 lying around... which they may have, e.g.
because they were allocated that /17 by RIPE NCC for a project or customer
than never actually materalized... then there is no RIPE community policy 
which would in any way prevent that LIR from sub-assigning that entire /17
to some customer who had exactly and only one router and one server.  Is
that correct?

>There are no 'maintenance' requirements as such in the RIPE NCC service
>region and these can therefore not be grounds for de-registering an
>allocation to an LIR.

So in the scenario described above, if in fact the LIR assigned an entire
/17 to a single customer, where that customer only had a grand total of
one router and one server, there would be nothing whatsoever that RIPE
NCC could or would do, in reaction, in order to prevent or reverse this
kind of colossal waste of that large chunk of the rapidly depleating
resource known as the IPv4 address space.  Is that correct?


Regards,
rfg


P.S. Sorry.  One more question... I don't know how RIPE operates, but ARIN
make every effort to do things entiirely and only "by the book", so to
speak, where "the book" is ARIN's own published and publically available
policy manual.

I'd just like to know if RIPE has an equivalent sort of published Policy
Manual, and if so, where I might find it.  Thanks.