Summary

  • At RIPE 72 in May 2016, Andrea Cima presented RIPE NCC's inventory of old ALLOCATED PI and ALLOCATED UNSPECIFIED blocks. Some customers had ASSIGNED PI entries inside them, while the LIR still controlled the covering allocation.
  • Cima asked the Address Policy Working Group what should happen when a customer wanted to move its supposedly independent assignment and the LIR disagreed. The meeting recorded a live problem, not a settled rule.

The adjective with no moving van

“Provider independent” sounds wonderfully portable. You can almost hear the wheels on the moving van. But a customer's ASSIGNED PI entry could sit inside an older ALLOCATED PI or ALLOCATED UNSPECIFIED block held by a local Internet registry. The label on the smaller entry described one thing; control of the covering allocation, and the agreement between the parties, could describe another. The RIPE NCC slides Andrea Cima took to RIPE 72 in May 2016 say the registry often did not know what the LIR and its customer had agreed.

The numbers made this more than a vocabulary quarrel. In that 2016 inventory, 30 LIRs held 68 ALLOCATED UNSPECIFIED blocks containing 915 ASSIGNED PI entries; eight more held 27 ALLOCATED PI blocks with 2,687 ASSIGNED PI entries. Those are entries in historical covering blocks, not a census of customers who tried to leave. The NCC had contacted all affected LIRs. Fifteen had asked to convert 37 unspecified blocks to ALLOCATED PA. Cima's presentation also reported that some LIRs still made new PI assignments from such space even though the then-current policy contained no provision for them. A familiar word in a database had outlived the arrangements that made it meaningful.

The working-group minutes catch Cima asking the question that the spreadsheet could not answer: who is the legitimate holder when an end user wants to move and the LIR will not let go? Where the two agree, he said, a case can be handled. Where they do not, the registry needs community direction. Participants debated contracts, database accuracy and the cost of tracing old customers. Cima reported nine contacted LIRs making or planning new PI assignments. The room did not turn that discussion into a new right on the spot.

Cima's useful move was to display the loose wiring. A registration can show who controls a block today; it cannot invent a missing agreement or adjudicate a contested promise. Calling the child entry independent while its exit requires another party's cooperation makes the word do more work than the record can support. Cima put the hard case on the table before a neat label could pass for an answer.

Original records