Virtual meeting
Address Policy
13 May 2020
11 a.m.
GERT DÖRING: So, good morning, dear Working Group. This is slightly unusual. Usually I'm standing up there looking at the big room. Usually it's 9 a.m. in the morning, not 11, so, welcome to everybody who is there. I can see in the Zoom display that we have 256 participants, which I find quite good. So welcome everybody.
This is the Address Policy Working Group and we start at 11 because, due to travel restrictions, people from other time zones have to get up early anyway.
So, let's see if this works.
This is what we're going to do today. It's basically the standard programme without the discussions. So, first some administrative matters.
Then we have a co‑chair that needs to be reinstated. Petrit from the RIPE NCC will inform us about ongoing current policy topics, and Nikolas also from NCC will bring us feedback about what's been happening in the NCC registration service in the last six months.
This is a slide that you usually don't see. This meeting is webcast using Zoom, and if you don't like Zoom, you can use the standard RIPE streaming. The stenographers are here, and you can see the steno on that URL, ripe80.ripe.net/live/steno. It's not in the Zoom because there is just no screen space but you can open a separate window and look at it there.
If you have any questions, please do not use the chat function in Zoom, but use the Q&A section, Q&A button. That will be modern by the RIPE chat monitors and they will relay to the presenters, so, it's easier to not get lost. The IRC channel which is available from the web page is also monitored and will be copied over to the Q&A. If you write to Q&A, please state your name and, if relevant, your association. Otherwise it's hard to properly attribute who said what.
There will be a session recording and it will be published, of course.
I said we'll do only half of our standard programme. So, we only have 45 minutes, and we do not do discussions today. On the one hand, we actually don't have any Open Policy proposals which puts us in a comfort position of not having to discuss anything. And also, the webcast format is not really suitable for lively discussion.
So, we'll do what we always do in Address Policy, we discuss things on the mailing list and skip the aspect quick round of feedback in the live meeting because it's not really a live meeting where you can see people and judge feelings.
But let's hope for the next one.
So, agenda bashing. Since it's really bare bone, this is more a formal thing to ask. I do not see anything in Q&A, so, I just go ahead.
Minutes. That's one of these formal things. We have been a bit late with publishing them, blame me on that. The NCC has done a wonderful job writing really good minutes, sent it to us three months ago and we were so late with reviewing that they only got published, like, two weeks and the announcement mail didn't make it up to the mailing list until yesterday.
We received one positive comment so far. And if you have more feedback, or something is incorrect, please comment on the list this time, because again, the Zoom webinar format is not really suitable for this sort of commenting.
Since usually I declare the meetings final at the meeting, but since I just ask for comments on the list, we will declare the minutes final in four weeks.
So, the other formal part. Working Group Chair selection.
As you are aware, the Chair people of the Address Policy Working Group take turns in stepping down. So, each of us has a time of two years and then steps down, and can be reselected. We don't do elections. We do elections by announcing the fact on the mailing list. We try to solicit more volunteers this time to actually have, like, a round of candidates and find the best one. We got one very good volunteer, very experienced, knows the trade, Erik Bais, and we got feedback on the list that people like Erik's work and want to keep him as a Chair.
So, I think without further ado, thank you, Erik, for the good work in the last two years, and welcome for the next two years.
ERIK BAIS: Thanks, Gert.
GERT DÖRING: Without having a room to applaud, I just applaud myself. And you heard Erik already.
On the Working Group Chair selection, there is another thing I want to mention, because eventually this will be a problem that the Working Group needs to solve.
I have been doing this for quite a long time, I had to look it up. I was selected as co‑chair in 2003. At some point, the Working Group might decide that you do not want me any more or I might decide that all this IPv4 /IPv6 stuff is just boring and want to find something new like IPv4 plus or so. So, it would be good to actually have a third co‑chair or somebody who wants to be a chair trainee to see if it's something he or she would like to take over from me, from Erik, next year, two years, who knows?
So, if you're interested in working with the community doing policy work, work closely together with the RIPE NCC, which is usually a real pleasure, unless I am sloppy, then they poke me, and that's a very useful thing. Talk to Erik, talk to me, talk to both of us. If you wonder what the Working Group Chair does, there is an URL that describes basically the job description.
That said, I now hand over to Petrit. Petrit is the policy development officer at the RIPE NCC who takes care of all, basically all the paperwork involved with the policy working we do, and reminds the Address Policy Working Group Chairs to get our homework done in time, like this policy proposal has reached the discussion phase. Do you think it should go forward or not? This is the chairs to do something now. So, thank you, Petrit, and over to you.
PETRIT HASANI: Thank you, Gert, I'll try to share my screen, I hope it works, I had a bit of issues with it in the past.
My name is Petrit, I am the policy officer at the RIPE NCC and I'll be sharing a presentation about the current policy topics.
GERT DÖRING: Sharing is a bit weird because we can see the speaker view. It's interesting, but not what you try to achieve. I don't think it's a problem either.
PETRIT HASANI: Let me try another thing... how about now? Is it the same thing?
GERT DÖRING: Now that's good, now we have the full screen view of just the main slide.
PETRIT HASANI: Okay. That's better.
So, in this talk, I'll be sharing a brief ‑‑ sorry, I lost my mouse. You can see my screen, but I lost my screen now. Sorry about that. I will be giving a brief summary about the proposals in our service region, what has happened since Rotterdam, I'll move further to look at what has happening in the other four service regions, so the we are four RIRs and I'll give a short update on the PDO to check, more to show the numbers from 2019, how many people participated in the policy discussions.
So, what has happened since Rotterdam? There are three ‑‑ two policies which are currently under discussion. One of them is 2019‑04 validation of abuse mailbox. This is being discussed in the anti‑abuse mailing list, and this policy says that the RIPE NCC should do validation more often, and should make sure that the the abuse mailbox actually works and can receive e‑mails.
It's currently open for discussion in discussion phase and if you're interested more about this proposal, tomorrow at ten o'clock, at the Anti‑Abuse Working Group, you can hear more about it.
The second policy the 2019‑08, RPKI ROAs for unallocated and unassigned RIPE NCC address space, this is being discussed ‑‑ I see that the slides are not changing, so I'll try to. I think it's a bit better now.
So, 2019‑08, RPKI ROAs for unallocated and unassigned address space. So the original intent of this policy was for, to instruct the RIPE NCC to create a route origin authorisation for all address space which the RIPE NCC has not not distributed yet and it's in our pool. I say the original intent because there is a new version of this policy. It has not been published yet. We are busy preparing a new impact analysis for it and it should give an update tomorrow at 11:00 during the Routing Working Group. So please follow it if there is interest.
And there are three policy discussions which finished the PDP cycle since the Rotterdam meeting. One of them is 2018‑06, RIPE NCC IRR database non‑authoritative clean‑up. I cannot read the whole thing, sorry. I have only half a screen, so I apologise if I make any mistakes.
So, this, to give a bit of history, this proposal got accepted. It was initially discussed in the Anti‑Abuse Working Group. A few years ago, there was no authorisation to one creating route objects for address space not belonging to the RIPE NCC. So anybody could create these route objects, and this policy says that if one of these route objects is in conflict with a RPKI ROA, it should be deleted, and it created a process for that.
The second policy, 2019‑06, multiple editorial changes in the IPv6 policy. It was discussing the Address Policy Working Group and it received your support. And it did some editorial changes. One of the main changes it had was that LIRs no longer need to submit approval requests to the RIPE NCC if they want to make an IPv6 assignment larger than /48. So, the proposer and the community decided that the LIRs have enough experience to decide it themselves if they want to make a larger assignment.
However, they need to justify these assignments if they submit an IPv6 allocation or during a RIPE NCC audit.
And the last one is the 2019‑07, default assignment size for IXPs. This policy was withdrawn. The intent of the policy was to change the allocation, the assignment ‑‑ initial assignment size for IXPs from a /24 to a need based with a /27 as minimum. But the proposer felt that the, there was no clear direction how to proceed so they decided to withdraw the proposal.
And I'll quickly go over to what is happening in the four other regions as well.
So, this is a quick overview of the policies being discussed in the other four service regions.
And I will not go in detail into all of them but I have picked a few of them which I feel might be of more interest for you.
The first one I chose the topic of IPv4. We still are working on IPv4. And it's from ARIN reserved pool replenishment. ARIN has two reserved pools, critical infrastructure pool, and the IPv6 facilitatation pool and this policy says that any address space issued from these pools should return back to these pools if reclaimed. As well as these two pools have priority over any returned address space if they have a supply of less than three years.
And the second policy is grandfathering of organisations removed from wait list implementation of ARIN 2019‑16.
And this ‑‑ ARIN 2019‑16 removed from the waiting list organisations which had more than a /20 of IPv4. And so the new policy says that organisations which already were approved to be in the waiting list should not have been removed by the ARIN 2019‑16, and should be returned to the waiting list to have the possibility to get the maximum of a /22.
Transfers continues to be a really hot topic. With policies in all four regions. The first one continues to be from ARIN, M&A legal jurisdiction exclusion.
And this policy says that in case that ARIN based entity merges totally into another entity from another service region and ceases to exist in the ARIN, it can continue to be a member of ARIN if they want to do so and continue to keep their resources, but they cannot request new resources.
APNIC prop 130 modification of transfer policies. This policy wants to introduce inter‑RIR mergers, including IPv4 /IPv6, but this proposal did not reach consensus during the last APNIC meeting and it's waiting for a new version of the proposal.
LACNIC 2020‑1, add IPv6 operational as a requirement from the IPv4 transfers. As you can probably detect from the name, this policy says if you want to receive an IPv4 transfer, you need to have an operational network IPv6 network with IPv6 prefix from LACNIC.
And there continues to be a couple of IPv4 inter‑RIR transfer resources from AFRINIC. However, none of them are close to a resolution.
And with IPv6. We have one from ARIN, IPv6 non‑allocation.
This proposal would like to change the minimum allocation size for IPv6 in ARIN from a /36, which is now, to a /40. And the second one is from APNIC, adjusting IPv6 PA policy, which was approved. And this policy added need to have the IPv6 allocation announced within 12 months.
For routing, I choose two policies, which are similar to the one we have in our service region. For RPKI ROAs for undistributed address space. So for address space which the RIRs still hold in their pools.
And to finalise with the PDP.
I chose three proposals, all of them are from AFRINIC. Policy compliance dashboard, the first one. So this says that since there are a lot of policies being changed all the time, members might not be aware of it. And they are policy compliant. So in the internal portal of the AFRINIC, members should be able to see how policy compliant they are.
The Chair election process, as the name says, they would like to set up a process for a Chair election.
And finally the Impact Analysis is mandatory. They'd like to state that for each proposal should be mandatory Impact Analysis and it gives a time frame how long AFRINIC should provide this Impact Analysis.
So, the PDO update:
So, this is a map of the participation for 2019. There were more than 140 people who participated from 36 countries. This was an increase from the previous years, and I am happy to see that, I am happy to see quite a good distribution. Normally we'd like to see a bit more in the Balkin area, Middle East and central Asia, but still there is quite a bit of distribution.
And these are some useful links for the current proposals and the other RIRs, what is happening, so if you are interested, you can just get from my presentation the links directly.
And questions? I was a bit quick, or slow, I don't know, because I could not see my screen properly, I apologise for the technical problems.
ERIK BAIS: You want the questions Petrit. So, we have a question from Peter Hessler. Let me read it out:
"It appears that the ARIN proposal reserve pool replenishment, ARIN 2018‑19, is actually ARIN 2021. 19 is a different topic and abandoned in January.
PETRIT HASANI: I apologise for that. It may have happened. I'm sorry.
ERIK BAIS: Then we have a question from Jordi, regarding the policy compliant dashboard in AFRINIC and the author:
"A similar policy has reached consensus in LACNIC. I am in the process to check, probably will send an e‑mail to the list with the same point, if it is useful, for RIPE, APNIC and ARIN."
PETRIT HASANI: Yeah, I mean, you can send an e‑mail Jordi. Feel free to contact me and we can talk about it.
ERIK BAIS: And last but not least a question from Randy Bush:
"What country is between Lithuania and Poland?" That's more a geographical question.
PETRIT HASANI: It's Russia. It's a part of Russia, so...
GERT DÖRING: And there is actually a question regarding my joke about IPv4 plus from Luna, no affiliation: "Why would you use IPv4 plus instead of IPv6? Is it for all the devices?"
That was a joke which might not have been a very good idea. We had a very large discussion on the RIPE members mailing list, fairly heated, about the proposal to do something called IPv4 plus instead of IPv6 because it supposedly is much easier to roll out. Lots of people entered that discussion very heatedly and pointed out very clearly that it is actually more work to roll out IPv4 plus than to do IPv6, because in the end, you need to touch every device anyway, and you already have everything in place for IPv6, you just need to turn it on instead of changing routers, changing hosts, changing DNS, changing everything. So, maybe I shouldn't have mentioned IPv4 plus, but if you're interested, go to the RIPE members mailing list and read up on the huge and not very useful discussion.
ERIK BAIS: All right. Last, we have a question from Peter Koch:
"What is the PDP participation per country supposed to say?"
PETRIT HASANI: Yes, it's mainly something that we have been doing for a few years, and it's mainly to have an idea how many people from the participants in the PDP, just to see the overall distribution of people participating in the policy discussion. That's it.
ERIK BAIS: So we have a similar question from Nurani:
"Just out of curiosity, regarding your map of participation, how do you define participation?"
PETRIT HASANI: Participation is someone who has contributed to one of the policy proposals. So, they send their comment to a policy proposal. This is participation.
ERIK BAIS: Okay. Then I think we're done with the questions so far. We can proceed. Thank you.
GERT DÖRING: Thanks, Petrit, for the report about current policy topics. I saw you had, were a bit nervous about speaking before the empty room and you can fully share it, and then having key notes play tricks on you, this is not really nice on Wednesday morning. So, thanks anyway for being with us and standing through the technical hurdles.
I would give you a round of applause, but the audience is muted, so, think of a big applause.
(Virtual applause)
So, next thing on our agenda is the feedback from the NCC Registration Services brought to us by Nikolas Pediaditis ‑ I hope I pronounced that half‑way correctly ‑ about what's been happening in the last six months. We had the IPv4 run‑out, run‑out, run‑out, I think, and the waiting list implementation, and other interesting stuff. Nikolas, over to you. Thank you.
NIKOLAS PEDIADITIS: Good morning, everyone. I will try to share my screen as well.
So, good morning again. This is indeed a bit weird trying to present in front of no one. But, yeah, I guess it's a new reality that we have to get used to.
I am Nikolas Pediaditis. I am part of the Registration Services team at the RIPE NCC. And this is the standard feedback session that we give in this Working Group from Registration Services.
And this time, I would like to talk about the post‑run‑out life. Some people thought it would be post‑apocalytic. There is life after IPv4. And let's see if we can show you a couple of interesting things.
At RIPE 79, we were focussing on discussing about run‑out, the policy changes that this would cause, and we were mostly trying to make an accurate forecast about the run‑out date. And it was a crazy period for the RIPE NCC, these were crazy times for the RIPE NCC. I would like to go through some milestones and a timeline on how we got there and what the current status is and what do we expect to happen next.
Later on, at the RIPE NCC Services Working Group, Phillipa will talk to you more about the operational side but will highlight quite a bit what I meant by the crazy times for the RIPE NCC for that period.
So what was happening?
Up until October, we were allocating approximately 40 /22s a day. We had a huge backlog of LIRs waiting for the last piece of IPv4, and on the 2nd October, we announced that basically we ran out of contiguous /22s. So after this point we were combining smaller /23s, /24s to make up /22 equivalents and trying to allocate those further. And during that period, we were allocating approximately 25 /22s per day, and those are quite high numbers. And, of course, it lasted until the 25th November, pretty much close to what we had forecasted, which was the date that basically our pools reached zero. There was nothing left. And we announced that basically we have run out of IPv4.
At that moment, the new policy kicked in, I might as well say the updated version of the IPv4 policy, which was basically reducing the allocation size from a /22 to a /24, and the IPv4 waiting list which was established the policy became impacted. If we take a look at that first month at what happened in the first month of following the run‑out, you can see a snapshot of the waiting list as it was looking then. So it took about a week for the first pieces of ‑‑ the first shareholders to come out of quarantine, so on the 3rd December, we issued the first /24 to an LIR. At the time we had a big backlog of LIRs waiting to get their /24s, so the waiting list was growing it grew up to a maximum of 110 LIRs, that was around the mid‑December, I think I think it was the 18th December, and you see the spike there. At that moment, more /24s were coming out of quarantine, out of our free pool ‑‑ or out into our free pool, and then the lines started talking. More and more /24s were coming out, the line was opening further, and, in total, we managed to bring the waiting time for LIRs to zero, and we'll talk a bit further about it a bit later on.
So, where did the last /22s go? If we take a look back in time, the last six months, let's say before ran out from June, July into December when things started going crazy, basically they went all around the world. We have members that are outside of our service region. Most of it went within our service region, but bits and pieces went to Australia, to Argentina, to Canada. Outside of our service region, if we take a look at the map, the country with most /22s was actually US, which is the country that is presented with the most LIRs outside of our region.
And if we take a look at the top 10 of receiving countries for /22s, then this is the least, the top three let's say were pretty close to each other. The champion here is the Netherlands with 573 /22s followed by Germany, Russia, Great Britain and France and all the way down to Romania and Turkey. These are the countries, the top 10 of receiving /22s just before they ran out.
So, what happens next? What is the current situation? We have a waiting list. It's working quite well. And if you take a look at how it looks right now, this is what you will see. So, we had this period between December and mid‑January, but quite a few LIRs were waiting, and that's because we had more LIRs waiting than /24s coming back from the registered space and then in mid‑January, that reached zero. So, from that point onwards, you might think that nothing is happening if you look at this graph. But that is not the case. Daily, we do allocate more /24s, it's just that nobody has to wait any more, so that's why it looks like nothing it happening, but it actually does.
So some numbers for you:
We currently allocate approximately five /24s per day on average. The total since the waiting list being active, we have allocated 645 /24s.
Now, we have a situation that is not totally normal, which is basically that we have released in total approximately half a million IPv4 addresses from quarantine in the previous six months.
Now, this is not a standard thing. It's not going to be happening every year. The reason for this is that last year, there were quite a substantial amount of LIRs that were closed. Some of them due to fraud, some of them due to going out of business. And those addresses were scheduled to go back to the free pool. Now due to some course of events, for example some LIRs initiated the arbitration procedure, things got frozen and we ended up being able to deregister these addresses much later than initially expected. And for this reason, these IP addresses went to our free pool after December. Normally they would be already in our free pool since last year and they would have been redistributed as /22s.
So we had a considerable amount of IPv4 addresses, which is good for the people that actually still want the /24s. But, it's a higher number that would normally have per year.
Right now, we have around 13 hundred /24s in our free pool and we expect to release another 456 of them within the next six months. So we can see that in the coming six months, we can accommodate approximately 17 to 1800 LIRs that want some pieces of IPv4 still.
Now, if you remember a few RIPE meetings ago, we did ‑‑ we produced a model, we did a simulation when the updated ‑‑ a potential update on the IPv4 policy was being discussed in order to try and show what would happen if for the distributing /24s instead of /22s. So by then the simulation we produced two models. One was okay, let's say that we leave things as they are and we we are giving out /22s and that is what's going to happen if we change that, we change the allocation sites once we have run out of /24.
Later on, the policy update came along and now, you want to repeat the simulation, but with actual numbers: So make a point and whether the policy was actually successful if the policy is actually working or intended or not, and if you look at the graphs, you can safely say that indeed the policy work was intended.
On the left hand you have the model with /22s, so if the policy hadn't changed changed then we're going into a waiting list, as things were previously. With blue, you see the number of LIRs waiting, so get /22s. Based on the average number of LIRs within 2019. So the situation would be that right now we would have approximately 2,500 /22 applications waiting to be fulfilled, and only the yellow bar, the /22s that we would have issued, which is really really low.
On the right‑hand side, you see the actual situation. You see what is actually happening, following the IPv4 policy update. And as you can see, we only had a small waiting queue in December of about 110 max LIRs, and, since then, we're issuing a considerable amount of /24s. So this leads us to believe that the policy indeed worked as intended.
So, applause to the community for reacting and taking the appropriate measures there.
Another policy that was updated recently was the one in regard to IXP assignments. And we wanted to take a look and see what happened since then, and did that one work as intended?
The obvious answer is yes. Because due to that policy update we doubled our IXP pool. Previously we had reserved a /16 for IXP assignments and we forecasted that, according to the conception rate that we had at the time, this would last until approximately 2023, 2024, another five years. IXPs are considered very critical infrastructure and for this reason the community decided that this is not enough and basically we doubled our pools and now we have a /50 in the reserve for IXP assignments.
Since the policy was updated, we saw an increase in the IXP assignment requests. So, if you take a look at chart, then you will see that already since September, but especially in October and November, the requests for IXP assignments basically doubled. And we had, on average, two to three requests per month before the policy update, and now we have four to five.
Therefore, the forecast for the depletion of the IXP pool that previously was set to approximately 2023, since we doubled that pool, the now forecast, if the current trend continues is around 2030. So we can say that maybe we lost around three years there. That's approximately 25% reduction in the life expectancy of the IXP pool. We don't know if that's worrying or not. Maybe the conception rate will go down, that's not something that we can predict. There was an effort, there was a new policy proposal that was suggested sometime ago that basically would make a change to prolong the lifetime of this pool, but it was withdrawn.
If we look at the current policy for IXP assignments, the default size is set to /24, and assignments, smaller ones, can be made down to a /27 per request.
I have to report that since October, we didn't have any requests for assignments smaller than a /24.
So this is a situation, we will continue monitoring it and then you guys can decide whether a new policy update is needed or a revisit of the idea that was proposed a few months ago to change the default size to a /27 on if a needs‑based model is necessary or not.
Let's move on to some other matters. I would like to share a couple of things with you in regards to registry housekeeping.
This is an activity that I would like to report more on, we have done a lot in the past. Apart from distributing and managing the life cycle of Internet number resources our most prominent activity is to run an accurate registry and we're focussing on that, and in the future, and especially for the next RIPE meeting, we plan to share a lot more details and plans in regards to that registry housekeeping, as just calling it right now.
Not only focussing on numbers, but focussing on the quality of the registry. And then maybe that would give some idea to this community for potential policy updates that might be good or not.
When we're talking about housekeeping, I first wanted to look at our own house, so, it's kind of a housekeeping of the house of the registry, kind of. And for that, recently we returned resources that were assigned by the RIPE NCC. It's this bunch of resources that you can see. For them, the regional criteria on which the assignments were based were no longer valid, so we did our internal ‑‑ we looked internally, welded our discussions, and basically following the RIPE policies, because they apply to everyone equally, including the RIPE NCC, there is no exception, we decided that we should return them to the free pool. And so we did.
We also, if some of you remember, have this AS number cleanup project running. This started in 2017, following the mandate from this Working Group. So what we started to implement then was to e‑mail LIRs that either hold or sponsor AS numbers that we could see as invisible in the routing system and ask them if they still use them and if they still need them? And if the reply was no, then basically to return those numbers ‑‑ those AS numbers to the free pool.
The reason we did that is because we saw a large amount of AS numbers not being used. And again, we try to run an accurate registry. The number was so high that we thought it was worth doing this effort.
This is still ongoing. In the past year, we contacted LIRs related to around 600 unused ASNs, and 266 of those were returned to the free pool. And in total, since the beginning, we have contacted LIRs responsible for 1,250 ASNs and almost half of them have been returned to the free pool. This is a trend that we see. Approximately half of the LIRs that we contact for ASNs that appear not to be in use, they just tell us yeah, we don't need it any more, we forgot, please take it back.
Right now, we see a bit less than 6,000 ASNs as not being advertised in the routing system. So, we're going to continue this effort and maybe even increase it. It's done on a best‑effort basis. But we would like to increase maybe our efforts there.
One thing that we see is that there is no strong incentive for people to return AS numbers. Sometimes they let them die out when they don't need them. Part of the reason may be because there is no charge for them so there is no relevant incentive for someone to say okay, I don't need this any more, take it back. But we do rely on our LIRs to have the responsibility to do so.
The last update from my side is a quick date related to inter‑RIR transfers.
Because soon enough, we will have an new entrant for them and that's LACNIC. There is a policy that was accepted in the LACNIC region sometime ago, and basically LACNIC will be joining the war of inter‑RIR transfers soon. From our colleagues there we know this roughly will take place somewhere within the summer, and that changes a little bit the overall picture of inter‑RIR transfers and you can see an overview. So, the result after this policy is fully implemented by LACNIC will be that organisations within the RIPE NCC service region will be able to perform transfers not only with APNIC and ARIN, but also with LACNIC. But that one will be only for IPv4. So, overall, between the RIPE NCC and APNIC, IPv4 and ASNs are included in inter‑RIR transfers. IPv4 and ASNs between RIPE NCC and ARIN and only IPv4 between the RIPE NCC and LACNIC.
And with that, that was it from me. I don't know if you have any questions?
ERIK BAIS: Yes, there are a couple of questions. Let's start from the top.
Andre Melancia: "Are people still creating new companies in joining to get more v4 allocations or a little ‑‑ a lot, a little? Do you have any numbers on that?"
NIKOLAS PEDIADITIS: Yeah, we allocate approximately five /24s per day on average, and of course this is a result of people become LIRs now, whether they are opening companies just for that, whether ‑‑ this is not something we can say because what we see is a company that's becoming a member of the RIPE NCC and requesting a /24. So, yes, the other idea is that people still need those, LIRs open and we believe it's part of the incentive is to get a /24, but if the question is in regard to speculation, we see this as going considerably down, we think that this has been decreased a lot.
ERIK BAIS: Yeah, would I agree on that. Okay, thanks.
Then the next question from Carlos Friacas:
"A question about the current IXP policy. The IXP has to be physical or are virtual IXPs also allowed to receive assignments?"
NIKOLAS PEDIADITIS: We did have applications for virtual IXPs as well, and yes, they are allowed to receive assignments.
ERIK BAIS: Any minimum member list or any other requirements that ‑‑
NIKOLAS PEDIADITIS: They are exactly the same as with physical IXPs. So, the policy requirements apply to all of them.
ERIK BAIS: Okay. Then there is a question from Mohamad Amer Alshishakly. I'm sorry if I butcher your last name here.
"Is there a deadline time for which we have ‑‑ we expect to have IPv4 stop working forever?"
That's a difficult one to answer. I don't have a crystal ball, I don't think you have either.
NIKOLAS PEDIADITIS: And it's not really up to Address Policy to define that. I guess it's actually for the network operators to come up with a forecast maybe for that.
ERIK BAIS: Then there is a question from Russell:
"Should the process for handing out ASNs be adjusted, made more strict to prevent handing out unused ASNs and subsequently having to ask for them back?"
GERT DÖRING: I think I'll just grab that question, because that's a question none of the panelists are supposed to answer. This is a question for the Working Group. You are the Address Policy Working Group and AS number policy is basically what the Address Policy Working Group defines. So, if you as a Working Group decide that you want to change the policies and make it stricter or loose or whatever, there is a policy development process, but basically before writing a formal policy propose, start a discussion on the Address Policy Working Group mailing list, and if there is traction to move into a given reason ‑‑ a given direction, then write it up formally.
So this is really a question for the Working Group. Erik, back to you.
ERIK BAIS: So, Nikolas, can you go back to the slide where you have the numbers for the ASNs so that the Working Group can actually see that again? What was actually reclaimed and asked.
NIKOLAS PEDIADITIS: Yes, of course. So, right now, we have a little less than 6,000 AS numbers that we see as not advertised in the routing system. Overall, since we started this project, the trend is that half of the ones that check with the LIRs are basically being returned to the free pool. So, we can say that maybe right now approximately 3,000 AS numbers in our region are sitting out there being unused.
ERIK BAIS: Okay. Thank you. We're running out of time. I have one remark from Jordi, that he is going to re‑try a policy proposal in LACNIC again for ASN and transfers, so he is working on that. And for the rest of the questions, I will like to ask you to refer to the mailing list.
NIKOLAS PEDIADITIS: Okay. Then thanks a lot everyone, and enjoy the rest of the RIPE meeting. I will basically stop sharing my screen now.
GERT DÖRING: We don't have any time for AOB. So, it's basically me to thank the audience. We have had 430 people. Quite a bit of discussion in the chat going on. Thank you for that. Quite a few good and useful questions to clarify things.
A big thank you to Nikolas and a round of virtual applause for I think very, very useful feedback from your day‑to‑day operation. It's good to see that the policies that the Working Group creates actually work, like in the waiting list policy. Good work there.
Apologies for running out of time. This virtual meeting thing is a bit harder to structure and organise than a physical meeting. I cannot wave at presenters but we're getting used to it, but I think it sort of worked out.
I hope to see you all in the physical meeting at RIPE 81, and of course, any ideas about changes, questions, discussion, whatever, are welcome on the Address Policy Working Group mailing list.
So, thank you for your attendance, and that's it for now.
ERIK BAIS: Thanks everybody. See you next time.
GERT DÖRING: So back to the NCC.
(Coffee break)
