Orbit

I see the proposals for Global synchronization as very attractive and hopefully progress can be made here.

I see similarities here with the other hot topic of the moment (no pun intended), climate change. In both situations it would appear to make little sense in not tackling the issue from a global perspective.

Like David Conrad I believe a graduated approach to rationing would be

a

more appropriate response than maintaining current policies. A gradual(?) tightening of the allocation criteria over the next few years, as certain promulgated thresholds are passed, would have three principal effects:

a) It would extend the life of the remaining pool (making the proposal to retain blocks of v4 address space against some unanticipated need unnecessary) and

b) It would provide more certainty on allocation principals in the run up to ultimate exhaustion and,

Would the existing member driven "bottom up" policy development mechanisms still be used? To be honest, I can't see members who have been paying their not insignificant RIR fees for many years agreeing to make it more difficult to get IPv4 address space for themselves.

Remaining with existing policies until exhaustion (real or artificial) would, I suspect, not only lead to chaos for those whose countries/ businesses/ customers require new allocations but also generate an active trading market (either black or otherwise) in allocations.

I agree with David, I think black market trading IS going to happen regardless.

In other words a first step could be (say) a requirement for some deployment of v6 in order to qualify for further allocations of v4 space. This measure alone would raise the bar on obtaining allocations and require some of the real problems of migration to v6 to start

being

addressed.

How would this affect members whose upstream carrier(s) don't provide IPv6?

Other measures such as trading and recycling of v4 space are

desperately

required but should not delay the development of a countdown roadmap.

How is this project going?

http://www.apnic.net/docs/policy/historical-recovery-guide.html

Maybe an update can be given at APNIC 23?

I know that the idea of recovering unused address space was previously met with an understandable "effort would not justify the reward" type response, but that was when we thought we still had fifteen years or so before IPv4 exhaustion.

Now that the end is looking much closer than we all thought, maybe attitudes have changed with the RIR communities?

If an entity who held an historically allocated /8 said "I'll return it in exchange for a /20 and $5,000 towards the cost of my renumbering", would it be worth considering?

Tim.