Hi Jim,
I'm unconvinced that "wanting to be independent" (of what?) for someone who's only needing some web hosting is a justification for PI space.
You made a nice speech about routing table size, de-aggregation and not understanding why someone would want to be independent. I don't see it like that. The way the policy is currently, doesn't solve your points. Let's take the following cases. A customer wants to be independent. They ask for PI but doesn't want to multi-home. They want to be independent of their providers IP addresses, they basically want their own. Let's take as an example they are a webhosting company with some shared webservers for shared webhosting and VPS's on their own infrastructure OR for instance a city with x number of desktops and possibility to be aggregated with other cities into a single larger city (this is happening a lot in The Netherlands currently, cities merging together.) Those cities want to be able to have unique IP's without having to change all IP's with each change of the government when they decide to aggregate multiple smaller cities into a larger city. As the policy is currently, both will not get IPv6. They could get IPv4 PI and that's it. This same webhoster OR city, applies for a LIR membership. They get a /32 V6, they get a /21 IPv4, no questions asked. This points out exactly my statement, this policy flaw currently isn't about de-aggregation, routing table size or something else. It's a money issue. If you pay a LIR membership, you get all what you want. If you want a 'cheaper than a LIR membership cost' PI prefix, you need to change your infrastructure setup in order to comply if you don't want to buy your way into the community. As suggested yesterday as well, increase the cost for a /48 IPv6 PI object from 50 Euro to a 200 or 400 euro maintenance cost per year to avoid pet projects at home behind a DSL line and get rid of the multi-homing requirement. I've actually seen multiple cities get IP's denied by their current provider, got fed up with it and apply for a LIR membership and decided to do it themselves. Regards, Erik Bais