As the process is consensus-oriented, rather than majority-oriented, I would find it helpful to have an authoritative summary issue-tracking statement. I'm not sure whether this should better come from either WG Co-Chair, or rather from the NCC Policy Development Office.
I agree, and I also think that we need to see a list of the names of all the people who play a role in evaluating wether or not consensus exists, and who make the consensus position into formal RIPE policy. I believe that this is the first RIPE policy change in which the issue of financial conflict of interest is a consideration. Theoretically, the people who manage the policy process could directly benefit financially from that process if they have IP address allocations from RIPE or IANA, or if they own part of a company which has such allocations. Theoretically, some of the people supporting this policy, may wish to have IP address allocation transfers outside of RIPE in order to sell their unneeded IP address without anyone knowing that they are making money from this. We cannot demand everyone participating in the consensus to reveal their potential to benefit financially from the change, but I think that it is reasonable to ask the "officials" to put their financial position on the public record. 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 process is to allow LIR A to sell their addresses in a secret financial transaction. If LIR A no longer needs the addresses then they no longer have a technical justification for having that allocation, and under current rules they should return the addresses to RIPE. If LIR A did this, then LIR B has a chance to receive the addresses that they need. Of course, LIR C may also want those same addresses, and in that scenario, the current RIPE policy has no way to resolve the situation other than first-come, first served. But the proposed changes allow LIR A to run a secret auction and transfer the addresses to the highest bidder. Neither of these scenarios describes a "market" of any colour other than "black". It is precisely to avoid these scenarios that the EU and other jurisdictions have market regulation. This kind of regulation generally involves transparency so that the prices paid in the transaction are publicised. In many cases, the bid prices are also publicised so that we would not only know how much the winner paid in the second scenario, but we would know the bid made by the loser. Considering that IPv4 is now on the road to being obsolete, I don't see any benefit to the IP network operations community from such market scenarios. --Michael Dillon