[6bone] Address management transfer proposal

[Mark Prior]

At 4:16 PM +1100 31/12/02, Anand Kumria wrote:
>Transfer to RIRs:
>
>Pros:
>	- no single point of allocation
>	- delegation of e.f.f.3.ip6.arpa
>
>Cons:
>	- turns 3ffe::/16 into a service which requires payment

There is no such thing as a free lunch and you should just get over 
it. Relying on the goodwill on an individual(s) to keep doing 
something for free when it clearly costs something to provide the 
service is a really bad idea.

>Keeping existing system:
>
>Pros:
>	- no changes
>
>Cons:
>	- may induce volunteer burnout
>	- no e.f.f.3.ip6.arpa delegation
>	- doesn't excourage migration to production IPv6 addresses

If people want a production service then they will search it out. If 
they just want to experiment then a sandbox is sufficient. Changing 
the way 6Bone addresses are assigned won't change this.

>Some points I noted, my comments are under them:
>
>+ RIRs have no incentive to pull-in IPv4 and hand-out IPv6; I think this
>will guarentee even slower IPv6 rollout

This seems really bizarre to me. Why on earth would you want to try 
to force IPv6 down someone's throat like that?

>It'd be nice if RIRs started to penalise their large transit/backbone
>operator for requesting IPv4 space but not have/using IPv6 space. It'd
>also be nice if pigs had wings too.

Don't turn the RIRs into policemen ("you can't have more IPv4 space 
unless you show us that you are actively using that IPv6 space we 
leased to you"). It is relatively easy for a tier one to obtain the 
IPv6 address space and even perhaps deploy it but that doesn't mean 
customers will want to get access to it. I've worked at an ISP where 
we had IP multicast enabled across the backbone and while we used it 
there was no customer product and no demand to create one. If the 
customers started beating up their account managers asking for it 
then marketing would have come calling and something would have 
happened. Similarly with IPv6, if the customers want it (and are 
prepared to pay for it) then ISPs will see the revenue opportunity 
and do something about it. If the customers don't ask for it then why 
would an ISP waste resources deploying something that will get no 
return?

>I'm not even sure if AS701 has IPv6 production addresses. Even worse is
>that the other major backbone with Australia (AS7474) hasn't even got
>any (6bone or production) IPv6 addresses.

You forgot about Connect (AS2764, 2001:210::/35).

Mark.