Policy Statement on Address Space Allocations

[Daniel Karrenberg <Daniel.Karrenberg () ripe net>]

  > Ronald Khoo <ronald () office demon net> writes:
  > You're trying to achieve a perfect policy that will work for all time
  > when what we need is something to eke out IPv4 for the rest of its
  > natural life.  

I am not trying to achieve a perfect policy. I am an engineer both 
by training and preference, not a policymaker. 

What I am trying to do is to discuss  proposals for policies which look
simple but break badly on already existing cases. 

  > By the time enough of your postulated ISPs have grown big
  > enough AND THEN shrunk enough for this to matter in any practical sense,
  > IPv4 will have become mostly static, and all of us here will have retired
  > from active Internet Politics.  I hope.

We are talking about real ISPs.  If you check the address space usage
history of European local IRs, you will see that the growth in address
space usage of some has flattened a lot (I was not talking about
shrinking yet).  Look in the area of national academic research
networks.  Your simplistic scheme, if cast in stone, would do the very
wrong things for those. 

Try again

Daniel