On May 23, 2012, at 4:32 AM, Tore Anderson wrote:

> * Lu Heng
>
>> Almost every hosting company here in EU has customer from outside of
>> region, they rent server from EU company for whatever reasons(for
>> making their EU website for example), but they are outside of region.
>>
>> If "end customer from outside of region can not assign IP addresses",
>> then all EU hosting company can not sell any hosting package to a
>> person in US for example, but that is not the case.
>
> They can, if the hosted service is in the RIPE service region.
>
> For example: You (assuming you're located in China) can come to me and
> purchase a virtual machine hosted in my data center located in Norway.
> It will be numbered using RIPE region address space. No problems. I
> could also announce this address space to peers on a Chinese internet
> exchange and backhaul the traffic to Norway myself, if I wanted to.
> Still no problems there.
>
> However, if I build a data center in China I cannot use RIPE region
> address space to number it. (Even if the customers hosted in that were
> all incorporated in the RIPE region.) If this had been permitted, I
> doubt there would still be available IPv4 address space in the RIPE
> region at this point, as organisations in the APNIC region in need of
> IPv4 address space could just have set up LIRs in the RIPE region and
> allocate away.

Apologies in advance for being pedantic, but unless some non-Chinese operator can attest that they have actually done one of those things -- i.e., use non-CNNIC(any) assigned IP resources to interconnect at a China-based IXP, and/or to provide (or even consume) data center services within China, may I suggest that we choose a different country for our hypothetical examples? To my knowledge, none of those things has actually been permissible, at least for the last 10-12 years.

Would love to hear that things have now changed, if they have in fact changed -- but unless/until that can be established it would probably be best not to leave false breadcrumb trails that might easily mislead future address-policy-wg readers.

Just a thought,

TV (who has walked down many such false trails in the past)