Summary

  • David Farmer and Chris Grundemann shepherded ARIN-2013-3, an optional /40 IPv6 allocation for very small ISPs facing a higher fee tier with the then-minimum /36.
  • Farmer asked the Advisory Council to keep the draft alive while a fee review continued. The council abandoned it in April 2013.

The invoice arrived before the addresses

A small provider in 2013 could want IPv6 for its customers and discover that the smallest available ISP allocation came with a larger bill. Under the proposed fee schedule described in ARIN-2013-3, the /36 minimum pushed an XX-Small ISP into the X-Small bracket. The draft called the jump a doubling of annual fees. There was plenty of IPv6 space; the awkward shortage was a price category that fit the network.

The proposed repair had a deceptively modest shape: let an ISP ask for a /40. It could grow that allocation on nibble boundaries through /32 without renumbering or another justification exercise. The text also set conditions for returning whole or partial blocks. Its author anticipated the objection: squeezing allocations to match a fee table could make routing and future growth less tidy. The proposal suggested sparse reservations so an ISP's future expansion would have somewhere to go.

David Farmer and Chris Grundemann were the Advisory Council shepherds. Farmer presented the draft at ARIN 31, where the room worried about the incentive to pick a too-small block just to land in a cheaper bracket. Participants also explored fixes outside the address-allocation text. Farmer carried the billing and allocation question through the policy process as the Council's shepherd.

At the Council's 24 April meeting, Farmer urged colleagues to leave the draft on the docket until the Fee Structure Review Committee reported. He had heard the room lean toward other solutions, but thought this one might still be needed. Other members wanted technical allocation policy to stand on its own merits and worried about /40s for ISPs. The motion to abandon passed. ARIN's archive dates the proposal's closure to 29 April.

That vote is the story's sharp edge. A fee schedule can steer which address blocks people request even though the engineering diagram has no dollar sign. Farmer made the collision visible in the meeting record. The council then chose to take the /40 off the table.

Original records