Given a scenario where LIR A has addresses which they no longer need, and LIR B needs addresses but the RIPE free pool is empty, then the only motivation that I can see for changing the current
allow LIR A to sell their addresses in a secret financial
On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 12:47:49PM +0100, michael.dillon@bt.com wrote: process is to transaction.
This seems somewhat distorted to me.
Without the policy change, that transaction would need to be done secretly.
Without policy change, LIR A no longer has the right to those addresses since they no longer have technical justification for the size of allocation which they have. It is historical practice for RIRs to not ask for the addresses to be returned right away since there is the assumption that LIR A has the intention to use those addresses in the future and that there will be no further IP address allocation requests from LIR A until they have used the addresses. This historical practice protects the larger aggregate block size which can be announced via BGP as a single prefix. But the new policy begins with the assumption that LIR A has no intention to use these addresses in the future, otherwise why would they transfer them. Further, the new policy does not protect a single aggregated BG prefix. Under the existing policy, when an LIR no longer intends to use their IP addresses in a network they are supposed to give them back to RIPE. That is OPEN and that is DOCUMENTED. An LIR could also just sell their network and all the addresses including the extra unjustified ones. If the new owner intends to use those extra addresses, then there is no problem. This kind of transfer is OPEN and it is DOCUMENTED. Today, an LIR can sell addresses in secret if they want to. If that is not fraud then it is certainly unethical. I would be happy to see LIRs buying and selling IP addresses in this way, under the current policy, because it *IS* unethical, and it will end up with these LIRs losing the customers who want to connect with a reputable ISP that is willing to do the hard work to make IPv6 feasible as the core Internet protocol.
Big Telcos with large ranges of dynamically assigned blocks have a far easier stance here than small ISPs that would actually need to renumber customers to free a useful block.)
And yet, these companies are ETNO members and they oppose the change at the policy level. In other words, even if the engineering group in a big telco might like the idea of selling some addresses to reduce their overall costs, the regulatory relations part of the big telco is opposed to this. What is the point of introducing a new policy to benefit the big telcos when the big telcos do not want the new policy? --Michael Dillon