Interim Policy proposal for IPv6 Address Assignment Policy for Internet Exchange Points

On Tue, 4 Sep 2001, Andrew Partan wrote:

> > AIUI the reason for restricting who gets sub TLAs is...
> >   If everyone (multihomed customers) gets a sub TLA then the
> >   default-free routing table fills up with multihomed customer sub
> >   TLAs and IPv6 routing tables are as cluttered and unscalable as IPv4.
> 
> Bingo!  Thats the real reason.  The only known way of keeping
> routing working is keeping the tables small.  There is no known
> technical means of doing this at the moment, so we are forced into
> the administrative realm.  Thus you see all sorts of rules &
> regulations about addreses and how to get them and use them.

This comes close to making sense - until you realise that RIPE's 
rules for allocating IPv6 address space are MORE stringent than 
those used for allocating IPv4 address space.

If the rule was that the fact that RIPE had allocated IPv4 address
space automatically qualified an ISP for an allocation of IPv6 
addresses, then its obvious that the IPv6 routing tables would
grow no faster than the IPv4 tables [1].  But in fact what we have are
much more restrictive rules for allocations from a very much larger
address space.

This is not easily explained as the consequence of rational policies
on the allocation of address space.  But it is an obvious consequence
of one might call the Galbavy Rule: the urge to regulate is independent
of any practical need for regulation. [2]


NOTE: 

[1] Of course RIPE assignment policies mean that most ISPs will
come to have multiple IPv4 address blocks, whereas they would have 
only one IPv6 block, so the IPv6 routing table should grow much more
slowly than the IPv4 routing table.

[2] And one should not forget that once you get your IPv6 prefix, 
you should never have to go back to RIPE again, depriving the
regulators of anything to do.

--
Jim Dixon                  VBCnet GB Ltd           http://www.vbc.net
tel +44 117 929 1316                             fax +44 117 927 2015