On 7-apr-05, at 15:29, Michael.Dillon@radianz.com wrote:
I am not a lawyer
[...]
As policymakers, we have to be concerned with the legal environment around us, and therefore this limit must be removed.
This policy has been in use around the world for years and apparently nobody bothered to challenge it in court. So either nobody cares or the legality is just fine.
There must be some technical justification for the request, such as the plan to run an IPv6 network that internetworks at least two IPv6 networks.
[...]
I feel confident that giving out a /32 to any internetwork with plans to deploy IPv6 will not create a routing table crisis.
So being an internetwork gets you a /32, and you're an internetwork if you (inter)connect at least two "IPv6 networks". Care to define "IPv6 network"? Would that be another organization (so 200 becomes 2)? Or just a subnet (so 200 becomes 0)? The trouble with all of this is that if we lower the bar so entities that we all feel should be able to have their own prefix can get one, this immediately opens the door for a whole bunch of other people who shouldn't. For instance, we've seen some messages from different LINX people. Apparently they have a number of projects (the number being smaller than 200) that require IPv6 addresses and they would like to assign those addresses from a prefix of their own. Since internet exchanges already get a prefix for the exchange fabric it seems reasonable to give them a larger prefix than just one for the exchange fabric so they can accommodate these other assignments as well as their own stuff from this same prefix. But what qualifies as an "internet exchange"? There are already many "internet exchanges" with members that can be comfortably counted on the fingers of one hand. So rather than just remove the 200 limit and brag that we're so good at predicting the future that this will NEVER pose a problem, it would be good to come up with something that's actually BETTER than the current policy. I'm still waiting for examples of PA requests that were turned down but, in our collective opinion, shouldn't have, BTW. I was thinking about simply reusing the IPv6 policies and requiring applicants to show the need for a certain number of addresses. But the problem is that with IPv6 you can renumber thousands of hosts with a couple of lines of router configuration. What is exactly the circumstance that makes the difference between getting PA space from an ISP being just inconvenient, and being too problematic to reasonably ask people to do so?