On Fri, 2010-10-29 at 10:17 -0400, Milton L Mueller wrote:
Consider: LIR 1, an incumbent, proves it needs a /16 to meet demand caused by growth in the number of its existing customers. LIR 2, a startup, also proves it needs a /16 to start up
Your policy privileges any actor in the category LIR 2 and penalizes actors in category LIR 1.
Both LIRs would be eligible for address-blocks assigned from the general pool. After depletion this means space that has been reclaimed or in some other way returned to the RIR for reuse.
Question 1: why are the customers of LIR 2 more important than the customers of LIR 1?
They are not. BOTH LIRs are expected to accomodate _growth_ in customer numbers through IPv6. NEITHER will get a large enough adress-block from the reserve to meet their growth needs. At most they'd get a /20 or /22 to establish transition services, no /16. The RIR's intention is to provide your LIR2 with a small block they can use to provide connectivity to existing IPv4 services for their IPv6 customers.
Question 2: why wouldn't LIR 1 form a new company and call it a startup to get privileged access to addresses? Or, might LIR 3, LIR 1's long standing competitor, form a new LIR to gain an advantage in the competition for resources?
One could argue for your position by noting that LIRs who already have some blocks of ipv4 are in a position to economize on and/or NAT those addresses, whereas an ISP without any can't do that. That provides some answer to Q1. But it doesn't deal with the problems around Q2.
Exactly. Most, if not all, networks of significant size have a small chunk of spare addresses they can recycle for transition services. A new LIR OTOH has nothing and could theoretically be blocked from entering the market. //per