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Re: IPv6 news

  • From: Brandon Ross
  • Date: Thu Oct 13 10:05:53 2005 
On Thu, 13 Oct 2005 [email protected] wrote:


Maybe its time to have a serious talk about IPv4 commodity trading

schemes.

Anyone interested in this enough to have a BOF at ARIN/NANOG?

I, for one, would be very interesting in such a system.  Distribution of



commodities is almost universally done best by capital markets.



There is a slight problem here. Commodities are things which
are bought and sold. In other words, one party has legal
title to the commodity and transfers that legal title to
another party. Since nobody has legal title to any IPv4
addresses, nobody can sell them in the first place.




That's exactly the change I've been advocating for years. Instead of
continuing with this socialistic concept that IP space is somehow owned by
everyone, we should, instead, give title for IP space and allow those
titles to be bought and sold freely. Classic economics teaches of the
tragedy of the commons. I can't think of too many things that look more
like a commons than the current IP space. By my own best estimates, 50%
of the allocated space today is wasted in one way or another, either it
is used inefficiently by staticly addressing things that don't need to be
static, hoarded to prevent organizations from having to make additional
requests to an RIR, or legacy assignments where the orgs that have them
have no incentive to give them up. Almost all of the exhaustion problems
that are on the horizon are being directly caused by inefficient use of
this scarce resource, certainly all of the above is solved by a capital
market.




Of course you can get around this by selling the networks
that use the IPv4 addresses, but then you are getting
away from the realm of commodities. A commodity is a
fairly generic product and networks are far from generic.




Again, converting to a capitalistic system is how we can stop this
underhanded practice.



--

Brandon Ross AIM: BrandonNRoss

Director, Network Engineering ICQ: 2269442

Internap Skype: brandonross Yahoo: BrandonNRoss