"No questions asked" policy draft
Hi,
The following document formalizes a current policy of APNIC.
I'd appreciate any comments you might have.
Thanks,
-drc
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Introduction
As the Internet is currently experiencing problems relating to the
number of prefixes found in the routing system and these problems can
have very significant impact on the operation of the Internet, APNIC
has undertaken a policy to reduce the number of announced routing
prefixes found within the blocks of addresses APNIC is responsible
for. This document describes that policy.
The "No Questions Asked" Return Policy
While it should be stressed that for the Internet to scale, all
organizations should obtain address space from their service provider,
pragmatically speaking addresses which were allocated historically
("legacy prefixes") have advantages for those who make use of them.
Specifically, because legacy prefixes are historically allocated, they
are unlikely to be subject to prefix length filters, thereby providing
long prefix provider independence.
In many cases, an organization will have multiple legacy prefixes all
of which require independent routing entries. In order to help reduce
the strain resulting from the continued growth of the default free
routing tables in routers on the Internet, APNIC will exchange
existing provider independent prefixes for a single provider
independent prefix of equal length or one bit shorter (to round up
should the amount of space not work out to a CIDR boundary) given all
of the following are true:
- at least 3 prefixes are returned
- the requestor can present documentation indicating they
have been delegated the prefixes in question
- all prefixes returned are provider independent
All three of these requirements must be met for the exchange to take
place.
APNIC will ask no questions with respect to the usage of said address
space -- more specifically, APNIC will waive the normal requirements
for address space utilization for the new address space allocated in
exchange for the discontiguous prefixes. The goal here is to trade
off address conservation for routing table entry conservation given
that the Internet operations community considers the latter to be a
significantly scarcer resource. However, as always, it must be
stressed that APNIC can make absolutely no guarantees that the newly
allocated prefix will be routable on the Internet.
Example
Suppose ISP A has four discontiguous provider independent prefixes
that are currently being routed, specifically 202.10.24.0/23,
202.12.113.0/24, 203.202.150.0/24, 203.224.18.0/24. If ISP A agrees
to return those prefixes, APNIC will provide ISP A with a single /21
provider independent prefix rounding up to the next CIDR boundary.
Conclusion
The purpose of this policy is to attempt to help clean up the swamp.
While it is true that the most appropriate course of action for an
organization with multiple discontiguous prefixes would be for that
organization to renumber into its service provider's address space,
realistically speaking the likelihood of organizations renumbering
into provider based space from routed provider independent space is
assumed to be small. This proposal is consciously trading off address
space for routing prefix space as the latter is considered more scarce
than the former and is subject to revision should conditions within
the Internet change.
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