Last week I sent detailed comments on the "Ownership" I-D to the cidrd mailing list. Scott Bradner (Ops AD) asked me to submit the comments that I wrote as an I-D for wider dissemination. I added an introduction (summary) and an ending (recommendations) around the original comments on the Ownership (leasing) proposal.

Comments on some of the parts of your draft: The document goes on to describe the nature and benefits of hierarchical addressing. It then, incorrectly, asserts that the Internet topology reflects a hierarchy and that addresses must be kept aligned with the hierarchy. This requirement is used to assert the need for enforcing addressing changes when (some) topological changes take place. The document makes no effort to deal with the very real difficulties this model creates for multi-homed organizations, including local service providers. Working group discussions have left the issue with citations to the original CIDR document, but it offers no real guidance either, since it largely presumes the NSFNet as the top of the Internet's topology. While the document may be lacking in various areas, it does not presume that the NSFNet is the top of Internet's topology. All of us that have been working on this draft have been intimately involved w/ the shutdown of the NSFNET. We know its gone. There is a loose hierarchy in the internet today - its made up of a partially meshed interconnection of several hundred ASs - not of an arbitrary mesh of a few 100,000s of organizations. [Note that a multihomed site (and there are few few of these today) are some of these ASs - they are a distinct piece of the hierarchy.] If we could reduce the routing entries to one (or a few) routes per AS, then we would have a major major win. (Yes, I did say experimental. Contrary to the comments on the cidrd mailing list there has been no large scale use of a leasing policy Several internet services providers are doing just this - PSI (for instance) charges differently for leased address space and has done so for a while now. AlterNet has always requested new customers to renumber into our space and for leaving customers to return address space; we actually have quite a good complience with this. --asp@uunet.uu.net (Andrew Partan)