Dispute over future IP address policy – stop managing scarcity?

For many years the Réseaux IP Européens (RIPE) - the internet address registry for Europe and the Middle East - has managed a scarce resource: IPv4 addresses. Last September, the final regular IPv4 addresses were allocated by the RIPE’s Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC) - the operational arm of the RIPE. The successor protocol, IPv6 is in place, but growing at a very slow pace. At the 66th meeting of the RIPE community (made up of Internet Service Providers (ISPs), network operators and other interested parties from all over the world) in Dublin this week, discussions addressed the question of whether the end of the IPv4 protocol should also be reflected in the address policy, by abolishing what has been established as the “needs based principle”. Could this even serve as a stepping-stone for the new IPv6 protocol?

IPv4 allows for 4.294.967.296 addresses to be allocated to devices connecting to the internet globally. Most of these addresses have by now been allocated by the five IP address registries, RIPE NCC, and its Asian sister organisation APNIC already have come down to a last block of the addresses they received from the central resource manager, the Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA). The other three sisters, ARIN (North America), LACNIC (Latin America) and AfriNIC (Africa) will follow suit in years to come.

Allocation of IP addresses: less bureaucracy

Until right before running out of the last IPv4 addresses, RIPE NCC was bound to adopt a conservative approach in allocating new addresses following policies passed by the community. To the last minute, ‘run-out-fairly policies’ were passed to ensure a non-discriminatory and fair distribution. Yet with not much left in the pool and regular address allocation over, Tore Anderson from the Norwegian ISP Redpill Linpro proposed to get rid of the obligation to document the need, in order to receive idle IPv4 addresses and those becoming available in the future.

Instead of filling a form for every allocation, the bits of addresses that become available should be allocated similarly to how IPv6 is. The declared goal of the needs-based principle – to maximise the lifetime of the public IPv4 address space – was just not there anymore. Many RIPE members welcomed the call for less bureaucracy.

Abandoning the well-established principles would clearly put RIPE at odds with its North American colleagues at ARIN. ARIN still has some addresses to distribute and moreover might have some more in the future as it is the region with the biggest potential to recover IPv4 addresses that were handed out generously to large US corporations before the regional IP address registries came into being. ARIN has declared earlier that is is not willing to share these so-called legacy address resources with anybody who would not be conservative and follow the needs-based-allocation policy.

Speculation in IP addresses?

Some US voices warned the RIPE community to not go down that liberalisation path. Bill Woodcock from Packet Clearinghouse said, “the purpose of conservation is to conserve the resource for the use of the community“. Now, no longer having a pool “getting rid of needs-based-allocation would mean that speculators would have an immediate effect on the market.“

One smaller EU operator agreed that small companies might be losing out. IPv6 certainly will be deployed, but it will still take time. A large operator said: “why cut oneself from a potential stream of IPv4 addresses when ARIN has the largest bite left?”. This said, ARIN's conservative position towards transfers of addresses have been the topic of discussion and research over recent years.

Tore Anderson said speculation and a black market with IPv4 addresses did not concern him that much, since in his view there is more talk about IPv4 transfers than actual transfers. With IPv6 growing, this concern might go down further and consequently, IPv4 addresses might lose their financial value.

IPv6 growing still much to slow

Data of the Atlas measurement network organised by the RIPE labs shows that IPv6 is growing at more than 100 percent per year, but still is at only 0,2 percent of overall IPv4 traffic. The CEO of the RIPE NCC, Axel Pawlik, appealed to his members to not only get IPv6 numbers assigned – as more than 50 percent of the 9,200 RIPE members have done by now – but also put them to use. Major concerns about the transition result from the potential technical disruptiveness.
Governments in some countries have started to look into IPv6 for their own networks. According to government representatives at the RIPE meeting in Dublin, the German government will ask the RIPE NCC for a second assignment of IPv6 addresses. Having already received a large chunk of IPv6 addresses in 2009 (a /26 block, which equates to 2102 single addresses) the government wants more to make sure it will be able to hand out a /48 address block to university campuses in Germany. One /48 network prefix allows 65,536 Local Area Networks in an end user’s site.