[ipv6-wg] Free GUA space for community projects [CfP/RFC] (was: Minutes from the IPv6 WG @ RIPE 83)

Good morning everyone,

a follow up from the RIPE83 IPv6 WG meeting: I had a few talk afterwards
and at I got the feeling that "not to ULA, but to GUA" would be the most
sustainable way forward.

## Motivation

The Motivation is:

- with GUA, potential connectivity to the Internet later does not
  require renumbering
- with GUA, reverse DNS is easily possible

We had a bit of a discussion on the IETF mailing list before [0]
and this comes with the obvious question "who is going to pay for it",
where "it" is mainly related to building, maintaining and supporting such
space.

## Target Audience ("consumer")

The target audience is "organisation who cannot afford to become an
LIR" [1], because if an organisation can become an LIR, they preferably
should.

## Target Audience ("provider")

Coming back to the who is going to provide such a thing, I believe this
might require sponsoring from one or more organisations. Obviously
ungleich as an Open Source/IPv6 provider is in for this, but I think it
would be beneficial if a couple of "core members" would drive such a
project.

## Project structure

In particular I imagine a free GUA service to be split into two phases:

* Initial setup (see below)
* Running / Maintenance / Support

## Initial setup

As the ULA registry [2] is fully open source and a django project, it
could potentially be used as a code basis. Aside from the actual
self service portal, other issues need to be addressed:

* Integration with the RIRs (mostly: whois DBs)
* Definition of policies
* Definition of support channels

## Running / Maintenance / Support

Now in the spirit of GUA space for community projects, I would envision
not *one*, but potentially *many* free GUA registries, potentially using
the same code base, but offering different policies. This would allow
registries with different objectives:

* A free GUA registry for a particular territory  (f.i. "North of Swiss Alps")
* A free GUA registry for a particular target group (f.i. "Only for hackers")
* A free GUA registry with non-monetary conditions [3]

And this brings me to the final aspect:

## Decentralised, free GUA registries

IPv6 can be a real enabler for decentralisation, because everything can
be made accessible. The very same principle also applies for a free GUA
registry: instead of having one free GUA registry, nothing would speak
against having multiple of them. As a matter of fact, it might even be a
good tone as an involved LIR to provide some free GUA space. Anyone
thinking of HE.net right now? Yes, that's the direction I am thinking:

Free GUA registries as a concept that can easily be cloned and
re-applied.

## Next steps: RFC / CfP

So how to go from here? I would be interested in an exchange on this
mailing list and also to hear if there are other parties here that would
be interested in helping out, either by

- reviewing the proposal,
- coding,
- helping in the policy area,
- supporting the first free GUA registry (read: handling support requests),
- maintining the first free GUA registry (read: keeping the platform up-to-date),
- or contributing financially

One of the unclear items from my side is whether or not there should be
some governing organisations like a foundation, but I guess this can be
clarified on the way.

All that said, I am very much looking forward to hearing your opinions.

Best regards from 50cm of snow[4],

Nico


[0]
    https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ipv6/fFpPHY55pwKlEopyyAZyZI8azg0/
[1] Community networks, NPO, NGO, Maker spaces, maybe even SME are target
    groups that come to my mind / are organisations I talked to.
[2] https://ungleich.ch/u/projects/ipv6ula/
[3] I don't want to elaborate to much on this one already as it has a
    lot of discussion potential - but the motivation is as follows:
    community projects usually don't have money, but time. So instead of
    having users pay some kind of a fee by time, a payment by "proof of
    work" might be feasible. The details of such an arrangement can be
    complex, but there might also be easy solutions for it. To be
    discussed & decided.
[4] https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/46.95037/9.03041&layers=N


Marco Hogewoning <marcoh at ripe.net> writes:

>  On 9 Dec 2021, at 10:29, Jeroen Massar via ipv6-wg <ipv6-wg at ripe.net> wrote:
>
>  Any LIR could simply take a /32 out of their prefix and delegate it for "disconnected use"... seeing that there are bunches of LIRs doing that kind of 'business' already, .... solved problem all of it, not?
>
> All,
>
> This sentence triggered me, knowing that back in the days we had looked at it. So a colleague was kind enough to cobble together some fresh scripts and put the two data sets next to each other…
>
> At the moment we count 24043 IPv6 allocations and assignments, comparing those to the routing information collected by RIS:
>
> 8773  are seen as exact match in RIS
> 2648  have at least one "more specific" route in RIS
> 12622  are not seen at all
>
> Now of course no doubt RIS has a few blindspots, so there is a level of inaccuracy here, also because this is based on a single snapshot taken somewhere yesterday afternoon, which means we may have come across an outage somewhere.
>
> Anyway, ballpark 50% of the IPv6 space could be categorised as "disconnected". As we probably all very well know, deployment takes time so probably soe of these are "in the pipeline" and hopefully will be seen and "connected" very soon.
>
> Yet, in my personal view the number is still somewhat high. There might be a few who purposely choose not to announce (all of) their IPv6 address space. But I suspect that is not the 12k+ we observe right now. Maybe not to far off to conclude that the address
> allocations outpace deployments or turning that on its side: "getting address space is not the cause of the delayed deployment".
>
> I just leave it here as a datapoint, but if anybody has any bright ideas to get more space visible because of deployment, no doubt many are interested.
>
> Best,
>
> MarcoH
> PS: thanks Rene!


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