Re: [sig-policy] prop-066: Ensuring efficient use of historical IPv4 resources

[David Woodgate <David.Woodgate@telstra.net>]

I support the principle of prop-066 as being an appropriate improvement
in management processes as we approach IPv4 address exhaustion.

It does strike me though that this will rely on an honour system from
requestors:

 - An ISP that attempts to comply with this proposal by declaring
their historical space will incur extra work and risk some disadvantage
(i.e. potential denial of additional addresses if APNIC staff believe
that the use of the previous space is not adequately explained),
whereas

- An ISP that does not declare their historical space would appear to
have little risk of penalty, as it is unlikely that APNIC would be in a
position to say "these historical addresses are definitely yours, so
you must declare them".

On a separate point, I suggest that section 4 should be modified to
include (just a little) more detail, as at the moment it reads:

"This is a proposal to modify the criteria for receiving IPv4
address
space so that both historical addresses and previous allocations are
included."

I suggest that this sentence doesn't really indicate *how* the
criteria should be modified; perhaps it should be something along the
lines of 

"This
proposal
recommends that the policy for allocation of IPv4 address space should be
modified to require demonstration of the appropriate usage of any
historical allocations held by a requestor. The usage of historical space
must match the same criteria applied under existing APNIC policies for
the usage of address space allocated by APNIC."

[Actually, looking through some of the existing policy documents,
I'm not sure I can see any statement that historical addresses
*shouldn't* be considered under the current policies, and even some
implications that they should be (e.g. Sections 9.3 and 9.4 talk
respectively about "all address space previously allocated" and
"with respect to relevant past allocations", with no indication
that such space needed to have been allocated by APNIC explicitly.
Nevertheless, it would be emphasising the change in practice, even if
it's not actually a literal change in specified policy.]

Regards,

        

        

        

        

        

David