Thus spake "Iljitsch van Beijnum" <iljitsch@xxxxxxxxx>
On 20-sep-2007, at 21:10, Stephen Sprunk wrote:
First of all, litigation isn't the only way to get something done, and
second, do don't know that until you try.
If you try to revoke someone's /8 or /16, you can bet that they're going
to sue you.
So? The RIRs and ICANN have deep pockets.
SCO had "deep" pockets too. IBM, Novell, etc. had much, much deeper
pockets. Do you really think ARIN or ICANN could take on titans such as GE,
IBM, AT&T, Xerox, HP, Apple, Ford, Halliburton, Eli Lilly, Prudential, and
Merck? Even _one_ of them? ARIN would be squashed like a bug. Not to
mention the entire weight of the USG if ARIN tries to mess with _their_ 13
/8s.
I'm confident that the RIRs' membership would oust any leaders that
knowingly got them engaged in significant litigation of this sort.
But there are other approaches than simply revoking the address space.
For instance, setting up a policy that governs who gets to keep legacy
space that takes into consideration various types of
use and cost of renumbering makes sense. I'm sure some
legacy space is used in a way that's fairly reasonable, while
other space isn't used at all.
I have proposed policy for ARIN to head in that direction. We'll see if it
passes next month.
Obviously the elephant in the room is the US government that has about 5%
of all address space, which seems excessive even for
legacy holders.
We don't know what the US DoD is doing with their addresses since that's
classified; besides, it was their network to begin with so they do have some
special priviledges. The remainder of the USG's address space appears
reasonable given the number of hosts/employees/etc.
I'm sure you're aware that different size assignments were
made to different organizations.
I was specifically talking about the /8s, where you get a decent
bang for your reclaiming effort buck. But even that isn't enough
anymore to bother at this point...
Those /8s are held by orgs with significant financial resources and are all
at least partially still in use. There are thousands of /16s and tens of
thousands of /24s that can be reclaimed with less effort, time, and cost
than a single /8 could be, because those smaller blocks aren't in use
anymore. There's also a fair amount of squatting on LIR-issued blocks that
were justified at the time but aren't anymore.
Even if true, that point is past. Based on current projections, it is
unlikely we'd be able to recover _any_ /8s before exhaustion hits due to
the protracted litigation that would ensue, and even
if we did manage to get some of them back (which isn't
guaranteed, and would cost millions of dollars in any case),
What would that be, $0.25 per address? Big deal.
ARIN gets a _maximum_ of $0.034 per address from the "Xtra Large" ISPs that
are consuming 80% of ARIN's address space. In reality, they would get $0
per address because those ISPs have already topped out on the fees they pay;
once you pass a /14, you pay _nothing_ for additional addresses.
My pleas to correct the fee schedule's indirect encouragement of massive
waste have apparently fallen on deaf ears.
IPv6 still won't be deployed and usable in any meaningful way unless we
make more progress in the next two years than we
have in the last ten.
Progress in various aspects of IPv6 has been slow because it
didn't need to be faster. I see no solvable issues with IPv6
deployment that can't be solved in those 2 years.
The single biggest thing we need now are consumer CPE boxes that understand
v6 and have 6to4 on by default. The host issue will take care of itself
over the next couple of years as non-Vista machines wear out and are
replaced.
We also need specialty boxes like load balancers, firewalls, NMS, etc. to
gain v6 support, but that problem is a few orders of magnitude smaller in
scope and could be solved within 2 years by operators beating on their
respective sales droids _today_.
(No, we still won't have routing that will take us to the next century
by then, but I suggest we don't wait for that.)
No offense to the ISPs, but fixing the DFZ is a relatively small problem _to
deploy_ compared to upgrading a billion end-user sites. It's a much harder
problem to come up with a solution for, though -- and the sort of problem
the IRTF and IETF seem to be best at.
Same thing for repurposing 240/4, by the way.
Decade problem. Come back and discuss that when Windows
recognizes that block as normal unicast addresses by default.
If we had done this two years ago it could have been in Vista
and in an XP update, so the space would have been usable by
2010 or so when the older Windows versions and other
implementations that don't accept these addresses would have
had the time to be updated manually or replaced.
v6 _could_ have been in NT4, Win98, WinMe, Win2k, WinXP, or Win2k3. It
wasn't; it was first implemented and on by default in Vista. Until I see
evidence to the contrary, I will assert that any fundamental change to host
TCP/IP stacks will take a decade to see in Windows, because that's the
example we have to work with.
Maybe the RIRs have contracts with all new PI holders, but that
doesn't automatically give ARIN the authority to reclaim
address space after a policy change.
Again, I don't know about all RIRs, but that is _explicitly called out_
in ARIN's Registration Services Agreement
RIRs would still have to show that it's a reasonable thing to do. I'm
still not a lawyer, but I could easily come up with several arguments why
I should be able to keep my addresses despite any contracts.
ARIN's counsel -- who is a lawyer -- has not stated that it would be a
problem for non-legacy space. Since he's discussed at length the problems
with trying to revoke legacy space, and he's responsible for the language in
the RSA that says ARIN can revoke any non-legacy number resource that
doesn't meet current policy, that implies he doesn't see a significant
problem with revoking non-legacy space.
Either way, we will have an official statement before the meeting next
month, so laymen arguing the point now is a waste of bits.
and AFAIK has been since day one.
I have never heard of a case where an otherwise legitimate organization
(i.e., not a front for a spam outfit or some such) used address space in
a way that wasn't abusive or criminal, but didn't comply with RIR
policies and got those revoked.
So far, ARIN has only been revoking blocks that were originally obtained by
fraud. It is believed that most of that fraud has been committed by
spammers; AFAIK there are no official stats on what percentage isn't,
though.
As a non-lawyer, I would judge the chances in court for
reclaiming IPv4 /8s higher than those for reclaiming IPv6 PI
space: in the first case, it's the benefit the continued operation
of the IPv4 internet, in the latter case, it's going to look highly
arbitrary.
I'd suggest you review the comments by ARIN's counsel at the
last meeting WRT revoking legacy assignments. It's more
complicated than it appears at first glance, particularly to
someone not used to our legal system.
Isn't everything?
The opinions of one lawyer aren't worth much. As a profession,
they lose 50% of all their cases, so obviously they must be
wrong 50% of the time. (Not sure if engineers do better, though.)
Lawyers are paid to argue cases their clients tell them to, regardless of
whether they think they're going to win or lose -- or right or wrong. Do
you really think SCO's lawyers thought they were going to win against IBM
and Novell, or do you think they were laughing at their client while they
collected massive legal fees? Lots of lawsuits are initiated _knowing_ the
plaintiff will lose just so they can bleed the defendant dry; in many cases,
the plaintiff (or prosecutor) prevails even though they're clearly wrong
simply because the defendant can't afford to fight them.
S
Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein
CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the
K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking
_______________________________________________
Ietf@xxxxxxxx
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf