Gert Doering wrote on 09/12/2021 07:56:
So, if you were to decide, what would you do?
the ipv4 address market is now the largest global supplier of ipv4 addresses. To put some figures on it, 11433920 addresses were transferred via the ripe ncc in 2021 so far (ripencc-transfers_latest.json), and 9696896 in 2020. alloclist.txt shows 2981 /24 allocations so far in 2021, i.e. 763136 addresses, and 1166 /24 allocations in 2020, i.e. 298496 addresses I.e. the RIPE NCC allocated only 6.25% of the total address space which changed hands in the ripe region in 2021, and ~3% in 2020. In a market situation like this, there are two ways of making an impact: 1. by being a large enough market player that decisions you make will make a significant difference to the ecosystem and 2. by changing the rules - which RIPE / the RIPE NCC has some ability to do. The RIPE NCC has historically been reluctant to interfere with past assignments, and it's unlikely that this will change. It doesn't have the market power to change the market substantially, and any rule change it makes will only affect new allocations. In other words, a policy change from APWG, if implemented by the RIPE NCC, would only potentially affect a tiny percentage of address holdership changes, and would be unlikely to make much of a difference in the overall scheme of things. In addition to this, Marco's email mentioned:
In the last 24 months, we provided 4,178 LIRs with a /24 allocation: - 2,019 allocations (48%) went to members with a single LIR account
Allocations to members with a single LIR account are unlikely to be wholesale abusers. Some of the LIRs with multiple accounts and /24s look like genuine ip address users (e.g. telcos / vpn hosting outfits / etc). But a number of them look unusual, e.g. where the first entry on a web search for their company name is their RIPE LIR ID.
So, if you were to decide, what would you do?
So, that. If I were supreme ruler of the universe, I'd get more information about these peculiar-looking allocations, then make a decision about whether it was worth either changing policy or operational practice to block or restrict allocations of this form, then model some potential options in terms of risk / outcome, and then after thinking about it for a while, I might make a decision to change policy, or executive practice, or not, depending on the overall likely outcome. Right now we don't have enough data to work with. Also, unless a fix actually fixes something, it's just busywork. Sander was right though: we're talking about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, and any discussion needs to be framed in this context. Nick