Re: [sig-policy] Discussion on IPv6 policy development
the strategic issues surrounding IPv6 policy at this meeting and a
number of you have indicated that we should do this. The agenda for the
meeting will be posted shortly and you'll see an item for this.
I've been watching the discussion on the list over the last few weeks
about the specific proposals we will also be dealing with. The issues
that are coming out of these discussions seem to be ones that we need to
think about. There are three important principles that are spelt out in
RFC2050 (http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2050.txt):
1) Conservation:
2) Routability:
3) Registration:
and our discussions on the list keep coming back to these.
RFC2050 notes that these principles work in tension with each other and
it would be good for us to try to see how these apply to IPv6. Perhaps
we need to change the emphasis we've placed on the different aspects.
We all have questions about IPv6 address space availability - as we roll
out plans for deployment on a large scale we want predictablility of
supply. We need a mechanism that we all can work with that allows us to
feel confident that addresses (possibly in certain ranges) will be
available. This is understandable given the whole history of IPv4
address allocations - early adopters tended to do very well and those
trying to catch up have perceptions that they missed out in some way.
Our existing policies don't allow for the handing over of large blocks
of space to any entity without detailed justification - these principles
are long established based on our experience with IPv4 as distilled in
RFC2050.
There have been a number of postings which make it clear that APNIC is
currently allocating addresses in such a way that there is scope for
expansion for all those who have had space allocated and this will
continue - see the postings from Gaurab and Sanjaya on prop-099. Do we
need make it much clearer and explicit that any organisation that has an
IPv6 delegation can reasonably expect to be able to grow that block in
future (subject of course to demonstrated need)? How large should that
potential growth space be? If a /32 could grow to /28 or /24 in due
course then very large organisations might only need a few IPv6 prefixes
in the global table.
Or we could adopt the idea that Sanjaya put forward of the different
sized 'reservation limit' blocks and have organisations placed into the
appropriate categories.
We also need to discuss the registration aspect of APNIC's function.
I've had discussions in New Zealand with our local law enforcement
community and I know that other economies are keen to deal with the
issue of having trustworthy records of who has particular IP address
resources. Some of this is an education issue for the law enforcment
agencies to allow them to access information that is already public.
There is an option to keep some IPv6 information private in the APNIC
database which may cause tension.
There are almost certainly other issues you will want to discuss. See
you next week in Busan.
andy