* Malcolm Hutty
Firstly, thank you for being so willing to engage with a view to meeting objections, rather than just defending your proposal. I hope my answer meets you in the same spirit.
Yep, and thank you for being constructive as well!
That amendment would *definitely* make the proposal more appealing to me. To my mind, this moves us from "2013-03 looks bad" to "2013-03 seems broadly OK but needs thought to see whether a little further wordsmithing is needed". Which is, I think you'll agree, major progress.
Absolutely!
How long do we reasonably have to think about that wording? I realise we're at a late stage, but I would welcome introducing more eyeballs to this problem.
Since we're still discussing, the review period will be extended with another couple of weeks, so there is some time. Hopefully we've have a text we're happy with by then, which will then as I understand it be sent to the NCC which will have to re-do the Impact Analysis. The first IA took 11 weeks to complete, so I *really* hope that we only have to ask them to re-do it once. (As you probably can imagine my first preference would be not to do it at all, as I consider myself a pragmatist and I think these changes have minimal *practical* impact, but oh well...)
In particular, I'm not sure I like limiting fairness to End Users, as you have done.
Actually, those words aren't mine, they are there in the current policy document (ripe-592) as well. This was 100% intentional, as I would strongly prefer for the proposal to not change previously established consensus on any topic that is not "core" to the proposal itself, or to introduce any new lofty principles/goals/ambitions. Nick's cautionary "a hemina of wine" example is highly relevant here. If we try to define *new* principles, we'll probably need further wordsmithing, which may in turn lead to bikeshedding and thus grinding the progress of the proposal to a standstill. Another risk is that even though we find agreement on a new text, the NCC may say in its IA that they interpret this to mean X, while our intention was Y - and we'll have to start over again. So while I have no desire whatsoever to stifle any discussion on any new goals and principles and any tools or mechanisms that would enforce those, I would strongly prefer if this discussion could be done in another policy proposal independent of 2013-03. With that in mind - can you live with simply retaining the "fairness goal" as stated in our current policy document and nothing more? I'm not necessarily asking for your *support* of the proposal here (although that would of course be very welcome too!); "I no longer have any objections" or "I abstain" is sufficient. (BTW: I don't think it is a problem limiting fairness to the End Users. The whole point of the Internet Registries is to get the resources into the hands of the End Users. Internet Registries aren't using the resources themselves, so they have no need for "fairness". Of course, often a single organisation will be both an Internet Registry and an End User, but in that case it will be covered by the fairness goal anyway.)
Referring back to your other comments on fairness, to the effect that "fairness" has already been abandoned in the last /8 for NCC->LIR, I don't necessarily agree or think it should be presented like that.
That's fortunately just my personal and pragmatic opinion, and not something I have any intention of putting into the policy. :-)
I suspect if we adopted the text above without alteration the effect would be to still require a documented need for at least a single IP address. We could further refine it to remove even that - but it has already been mentioned that this is a negligible requirement; how would you feel about leaving it in, given that it's so little? Taken together with the bit in the second set of square brackets, this policy would exclude those that apply simply in order to re-sell, but nobody else. I would think that a simple checkbox "Do you intend to use at least one of these IP addresses on a network you operate?" should satisfy the documentation requirement.
(Filiz: I understood that this is essentially the same issue you described in your last post to the list. Therefore I'm CC-ing you in here rather than replying to your message directly, hope that's OK.) I have no strong feelings against this, no, the amount of red tape is minimal and in any case something an LIR will have to deal with at most *once*. The main reason I have resisted this is that in practical terms it is nearly meaningless as a barrier against those who would abuse it, and asking the NCC to re-do the IA just to get it in there would IMHO be a waste of time and effort. However, if we need to change the proposal and re-do the IA anyway, might as well do this one too. So here's my suggested text. In the proposed section 5.1 (http://www.ripe.net/ripe/docs/other-documents/draft-v2-ipv4-address-allocati...) we add a new point: «4. In order to qualify for receiving the allocation, the LIR must state an intent to use it for making assignments to one or more End Users.» I think this describes the current status quo pretty well, and should result in a check-box like the one you described in the request form (something I'll try to confirm with Andrea *before* the whole updated proposal is sent back to the NCC). Would this be sufficient to remove your concerns? Best regards, Tore Anderson