Template: ARIN-POLICY-PROPOSAL-TEMPLATE-1.0
ARIN shall on a one-time basis preemptively assign IPv6 address space according to the following formula:
1. ARIN shall identify the organization associated with all ARIN-registered AS numbers present in the public Internet BGP table during a staff-selected 30 day period. Only organizations announcing at least one IPv4 prefix into the public Internet BGP table using an ARIN-registered AS numbers shall receive preemptive assignments or allocations.
2. Only registered organizations which have not already received IPv6 assignments or allocations from ARIN shall receive preemptive assignments or allocations.
3. ARIN shall differentiate between ISP organizations which pay ISP fees and end-user organizations which pay end-user fees. For these purposes, an organization paying ARIN for IPv4 addresses under a legacy RSA shall be considered an end-user organization. Organizations which do not pay ARIN annual fees shall not be eligible to receive preemptive assignments or allocations.
4. ISPs announcing a /16 or more of IPv4 address space into the public Internet BGP table shall be preemptively allocated a /28 of IPv6 addresses.
5. ISPs announcing less than a /16 of IPv4 address space into the public Internet BGP table shall be preemptively allocated a /32 of IPv6 addresses.
6. End users announcing a /20 or more of IPv4 address space into the public Internet BGP table shall be preemptively allocated a /40 of IPv6 addresses.
7. End users announcing less than a /20 of IPv4 address space into the public Internet BGP table shall be preemptively allocated a /48 of IPv6 addresses.
Each such allocation or assignment shall expire exactly 3 years from the date made unless explicitly accepted by the receiving organization by signing an appropriate registration services agreement and paying all fees due ARIN. Where a registrant desires some other size of initial IPv6 assignment or has some other reason, the registrant may also return the allocation or assignment early.
It stands undisputed that, "Here are your shiny new IPv6 addresses; please use them," is a far more persuasive message than, "We'd really like you to deploy IPv6. Please fill out the permission slip, explain how you plan to use IPv6 and, of course, pay us."
It is to YOUR direct financial BENEFIT for "everybody else" to deploy IPv6. If you have already received and deployed IPv6 addresses on your network, maintaining that operation is costing you money - every year, every month, every day. The benefit you gain from that cost is tightly limited by the degree to which your neighbors and colleagues use IPv6. Until they use IPv6 too, you're paying for nothing.
Registration is not deployment. However, the organizations covered by this policy, those mostly multihomed organizations announcing BGP routes to the public Internet, have by their behavior with IPv4 demonstrated unequivocally that when they deploy IPv6 they will do so with registry-assigned addresses.* Any delay in receiving those addresses from the registry, be it a day, a week, a month, is also a delay in those organizations actually using IPv6. That, in turn, is an increase in time and therefore cost you will pay to continue carrying both IPv4 and IPv6.
Hence it is to YOUR financial BENEFIT for those organizations to receive IPv6 assignments sooner rather than later.
According to the figures presented at ARIN Atlanta, only about 25% of the ARIN-region organizations who will need to deploy IPv6 to make your IPv6 use worthwhile have so much as requested addresses. This policy proposal's author respectfully encourages you to both save yourself some money and create new opportunities for your organization by smoothing the path for your colleagues and competitors' IPv6 deployments.
* Due to ISP filtering, more-specific IPv6 routes from ISP reassignments do not universally propagate in BGP the way /24 reassignments do in IPv4. For technically successful operation, a multihomed IPv6 network must employ addresses from a registry-defined end-user address block.
A note to the ARIN board: given the unique and remarkable challenge associated with worldwide IPv6 deployment, the author respectfully believes it in the interests of sound public policy for ARIN to waive initial assignment fees associated with these preemptive registrations and, upon acceptance by the registrant, charge only the applicable annual fees due that year. Though small, those fees present an internal policy barrier obstructing engineers within some of those organizations from moving on IPv6. In the interests of fairness to the early movers, the author also respectfully encourages ARIN to refund initial IPv6 registrations fees made to date.
END OF TEMPLATE