North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Using unallocated address space

  • From: Hank Nussbacher
  • Date: Thu Feb 15 14:31:57 2001 
At 10:58 15/02/01 -0800, Alan Hannan wrote:


> The registries, ARIN/RIPE/APNIC should announce the offending block
> themselves and shunt it to null0.  If the offender announces a /18 then
> they should announce theirs as 2x/19s and thereby override the bogus /18.

  While a novel idea, I believe it is particularly dangerous to
  have an allocation registry strictly control operational use.

  A separation of power between the allocation and the dynamic-real-time
  use of address space is beneficial for many reasons.

  Historically, this separation of power has been maintained.  For
  example, Sprint/smd's draconian filtering and aggregation policies
  were synergistic with address allocation policies, however, allocation
  rules were based upon different enforcement methods.

  Allocation registries allocate 'temporary ownership' of address
  space, without any respect for routability of address space.

  Allow the ISPs to police themselves, perhaps with assistance from
  ARIN/RIPE/APNIC.  If they choose not to police themselves, that
  is their prerogative.

  I would support an available list of routes or BGP feed of allocated
  v. unallocated space, which ISPs could subscribe to so as to
  self-police proper address usage.  In fact, it's unclear to me how
  ARIN could affect the routing of others, without dictating that ISPs
  respect their announcements.  And I certainly would not want that.
Self policing has been tried for years. It don't work. "Seperation of power" is a nice utopian ideal, but when you have IP cybersquatters out there who know how to abuse the system, they will win.

I know of a case where a LIR assigned a block to an organization and revoked it a year later after the organization did not meet the standard requirements. The organization is signed on an agreement to follow the standards. The LIR revoked the IP block, but the upstream ISP continues to announce it since it is signed on an agreement with the organization to provide routing and doesn't want to risk a lawsuit from the organization. So this block is now dead in the water since it can't be reassigned to any other client since it is in pseudo-use.

No ISP will risk a lawsuit by black-holing something. This has to be done by the allocation agency (ICANN or ARIN/RIPE/APNIC).

-Hank


All in all, this proposal is flawed for many reasons.

The goal of keeping the internet from splintering and properly
using allocated space is a good one.

This proposal is not the right way to help achieve that goal.

-alan



Thus spake Hank Nussbacher ([email protected])
on or about Thu, Feb 15, 2001 at 07:31:52PM +0200:
>
> At 22:56 12/02/01 -0800, Sean Donelan wrote:
>
> >On Mon, 12 February 2001, John Fraizer wrote:
> > > Any time a network is caught announcing non-allocated address space, the
> > > registry should bill them accordingly. If they refuse to pay, the
> > > registry should yank their ASN. That would be strong encouragement to do
> > > the right thing.
> >
> >Other than making it difficult for people to figure out WHOIS using that
> >ASN, "yanking" an ASN's registration has little practical effect. You
> >can use an un-allocated ASN almost as easily as using an un-allocated
> >address block.
>
> The registries, ARIN/RIPE/APNIC should announce the offending block
> themselves and shunt it to null0. If the offender announces a /18 then
> they should announce theirs as 2x/19s and thereby override the bogus /18.
>
> I don't think the problem is so huge that a few dozen extra prefixes
> announced by the registries will bloat and kill the routing table size. If
> the registries don't do this, these cybersquatters will come thru later on
> and demand to keep the IP address space they have grabbed just as the .sex,
> and .web and all the other alternate DNSers have done.
>
> -Hank
>
>