North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Market-based address allocation

  • From: bmanning
  • Date: Wed Apr 30 18:03:31 2003 
> At 03:43 PM 4/30/2003 -0500, Jack Bates wrote:
> >Without mandating necessity, I'd also point out that there would no longer 
> >be IPv4 address space available except at outrageous prices for smaller 
> >networks that wish to multi-home and have their own netblocks.
> 
> At 02:10 PM 4/30/2003 -0700, [email protected] wrote:
> 
> >         Oh... sorry, are folks really seriously wanting
> >         to treat integers as a marketable commodity?
> 
> I'm confused--are IPv4 netblocks so valuable that we can't expect the 
> market to set a reasonable price, or are IPv4 netblocks (sets of integers) 
> so worthless that they're not worth the trouble of trading at all?
> 
> Bill Nickless    http://www.mcs.anl.gov/people/nickless      +1 630 252 7390

	Oh, I expect that I beleive that some folks are so confused by
	the smoke/mirrors of ISP politics that they are willing to
	pay good money to have their name associated with a prefix.
	and not just any prefix mind you, one that starts with 192 or
	is /16 or longer.  ISPs treat those things as golden and will
	transit bits around from such things w/ impunity.  Of course
	if these prefixes become a commodity, then I get to impune
	intellectual property on my prefix.  e.g.  8 (tm)  and
	everyone who uses 8 must pay me a royalty.  Equally, if these
	things become a commodity, some studly wallet will buy them all
	and then where will you be?  Rapidly moving to IPv6 I expect. :)

	As mentioned earlier in this thread, the value is not the prefix
	or its length, its the ability to get and maintain a prefix in
	the routing systems of the sites you wish to communicate with.

	the slot is valuable, not what you place in it.

	e.g.  the numbers, in and of themselves, are worthless.

	however, if I can get ANL to transit my packets by using 
	130.202.0.0/16 numbers as the source addresses for packets
	I generate, that may have value.  

	even more value may be obtained if I can convince rafts of
	more dewey-eyed neophytes to pass my bits around with that
	prefix as the origin of my sourced packets.   

	in the end, its not the prefix, its the routing table slot.