Hi Scott,
Can anyone tell me what in this policy proposal would prevent an organization from transferring address space, turning around and requesting more space from APNIC, transferring that space, etc. etc.?
Nothing, we are clever aren't we !Also nothing to stop people avoiding the Initial Resource Charge. Simply join as an associate member and get another member to transfer some of their space to you. This will save you $3,169 by never having to pay the initial fee and your friendly member simply requests more space when they now run out, albeit sooner.
People can now combine up their memberships. 16 small members each with a /20 can now transfer their resource to a new single Medium member, reducing their costs from $50,704 (16 x $3,169) to a share of the Medium membership ($396) plus the small costs of drafting a decent agreement. At least in this example no resources were wasted, and no- one is really effected, well except APNIC who's revenue drops by ~ $44,000 and the Medium member if free to continue to request more resources.
My personal favorite is all the non AP region companies who will be lining up to transfer their resources to their (new or existing) APNIC account, thus removing all those pesky requirements of having to justify their existing resources.
This seems like a loophole big enough to use to corner the IPv4 address market, and drain both the APNIC and IANA free pools in a very short time.
Yes people were more concerned about the integrity of the registry than the effects of this policy on the Free Pool, APNIC revenue or creating sanctioned address hoarding.
We as a region at APNIC26 managed to pass a policy prop-066 requiring historical allocations to be justified for future IP resource requests, yet now we have a policy that negates that, simply transfer all your historical space to a friendly member (or your own second member) (and optionally back) will solve that problem, you no-longer need to justify any of it.
Prior versions of this proposal had some safeguards to prevent that kindof thing, but it looks like all of those were removed in this version.
For those of you not there to understand how we ended up with this proposal, in the last 10 minutes the Chair decided that it was better to have *any* policy rather than a policy with any form group consideration, so we randomly removed parts of the proposal to the point where (even the english speakers) were confused as to what the actual policy was.
So yes we now have a policy that has significant risk to the IANA Free Pool, APNIC revenues and the entire concept of justified allocation of IP resources.
-Scott
-- James