Randy,
could you please explain why we need one?  what does it do for the internet?

randy

- First of all I believe it is good that we discuss this issue inside the RIR community, specially because if we decide to do something this is the moment. So I believe it is good "institutionally" for the RIR system to be able to discuss this issue. 

- The policy that has been processed is clearly in the arena of what can be implemented easily, with no technical impact on the global routing table. So, what about the option of leaving the allocations as they are?.  It is clear the the actual scenario rewards the utilization of addresses. Is this bad? not necessarily, the central pool will dry at some point.  However, I do see an issue with the uncertainty for the different RIR about the scenario that they will be facing at the time of the last allocation. Different scenarios can be looked if the last allocation is given to "big" or "small" RIR. 

- Also, if any RIR would like to implement conservative policies, that will not happen under the current policy. Conservative policies could be seen as extending the life of v4 or actually encouraging the use of v6 (as David's Conrad slow landing proposal). 

- Another issue is the pressure on the central pool. I believe that David Conrad mentioned several times in different mailing legal issues that IANA  could when facing a last allocation. I do not know if this issue has been studied by IANA (would be good to know) but it is clear that a global policy directing IANA about what to do with that final allocation in terms that we as a global community have consensus is beneficial.

- Now I have to quote (although I do not remember the exact words) a comment given at the mike at LACNIC open policy forum. "we all are in the same lake, a lake that is running out of water, a lake full of sharks but we are all carrying different load in our boats". So we need to look at the allocated address up into this point by the RIR and the legacy allocations.

We know that the smallest RIR are the ones with the lower rate of addresses per user, mainly because they did not get legacy allocations and also because of more extensive use of NAT (I just been in El Salvador and all their university system runs inside a NAT cloud).  But this regions are reaching a big technology breakthrough as WIMAX and 3G internet access will allow broadband access as an alternative to DSL/CABLE or Satellite or just nothing...

So we know that probably ARIN and RIPE will be able to get some legacy allocations back to their pool and will be able to face the beginning of the  transition from the dual stack scenario. But what about APNIC and the smaller RIR?.

Well for LACNIC and AFRINIC clearly it is critical that they are not the first RIRs to run out of addresses as they do not have any negotiation power on a secondary address market nor with hard/soft. manufacturers.

Regards,Roque


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Roque Gagliano ANTEL - URUGUAY 
rgaglian@antel.net.uy