ARIN-prop-294: Remove IPv6 End-User Assignment Criteria [Archived]

Date: 19 November 2020

Proposal Originator: Peter Jin

Problem Statement:

6.5.8.1 provides several criteria to determine eligibility for an IPv6 initial assignment:

[a] already having an IPv4 assignment [b] IPv6 multihoming [c] actively using 2000 IPv6 addresses [d] actively using 200 /64 subnets [e] 13 active sites [f] justification as to why ISP/LIR addresses cannot be used.

The specific problems with this are:

• /48’s are extremely abundant, much more so than IPv4 addresses. Even if everyone in the world had a /48, it would only take up one or more /16’s. It is not necessary to have elgibility criteria for obtaining /48’s; the fees should be enough; everyone in the world obtaining a /48 (or even a /44) would be $250 x 7 billion = $1.75 trillion, which is around 5% of the U.S. GDP.

• Criterion [c] can easily be abused. This number can be thought of as very large since hosts only have a few IPv6 addresses assigned to them, however, the nature of subnet routing allows for all 2^80 IP addresses to be used at once (perhaps with a custom TCP/IP stack); see the next point.

• Furthermore; there is no clear meaning of “active use” as said within [c] and [d]. Does “active use” mean “assigned to a host”? Assigned to a service? Responds to ICMP echo (on the public Internet)? One of my web apps, “IPv6 Things” (https://www.peterjin.org/wiki/IPv6_Things, https://ipv6-things.srv.peterjin.org) may be considered to have made “active use” of

• 1 address, if the first meaning is used

• 42,000 addresses, if the second meaning is used (each of the “things” on that website has its own IPv6 address)

• 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 addresses, if the third meaning is used

Policy Statement:

Proposal:

• Remove 6.5.8.1
• Change the first sentence of 6.5.8.2 to “All end-user organizations are eligible to receive an initial assignment of /48.”

Timetable for implementation: Immediate