Template: ARIN-POLICY-PROPOSAL-TEMPLATE-1.0
ARIN shall immediately waive the host count count requirement for applicants seeking IPv6 end-user assignments. All other requirements for assignment remain in full effect.
This waiver shall be in effect only for those registrants for which all resources managed by ARIN are covered by ARIN's normal registration services agreement.
This waiver shall end upon determination by ARIN staff that a technology which enables effective IPv6 multihoming without requiring provider-independent space has been ubiquitously deployed within the ARIN region.
ARIN has a back-door requirement for IPv6 end-user registrations under the number resource policy manual section 6.5.8.1b: registrants must deploy roughly 500 hosts. While the size of the IPv6 address space is vast enough to make this unnecessary, practical considerations about the size of the routing table in the Default-Free Zone recommend it.
Unfortunately, this ARIN policy has the unintended consequence of preventing entrepreneurs, small operators and other sub-millionaires from achieving the reliability offered by multihoming and the administrative benefit from static addressing. Many such organizations already enjoy multihoming and stable static addressing with their existing IPv4 provider-independent assignments. Thus prevented, those organizations are strongly discouraged from deploying IPv6.
While technologies like Shim6 are in the works to address the multihoming problem, none will be widely implemented in deployed software for many years.
It is in the community's strong interest to widely deploy IPv6 prior to the exhaustion of the IPv4 address space. This cannot happen while entrepreneurs and small operators have reason for passive hostility towards IPv6's deployment.
This proposal removes the last major policy-level barrier to IPv6 deployment.
END OF TEMPLATE