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RE: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit

  • From: michael.dillon
  • Date: Mon Feb 18 09:14:59 2008

> the article here
> http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/021308-ipv6-delay.html 
> is an interesting read given the current state of IPv4 
> depletion/IPv6 conversion operational climate.
> As it is indicated, it's a proposal and there are 
> considerations as to whether it makes things better or worse.

Not sure what proposal this article refers to. The proposals
under discussion are posted here
<http://www.arin.net/policy/proposals/proposal_archive.html>

Note that all kinds of crazy ideas get proposed to ARIN and 
most of them never see the light of day. If you carefully read
the Adopted and Abandoned proposals listed on the ARIN page
you will see that the Adopted ones tend to be incremental
improvements, not radical change.

In the case of this "address commodity" idea, most people believe
that it will not do much, if anything, to mitigate the effects
of running out of IPv4 addresses which will hit us in about
two years from now. It is too costly for companies to free
up addresses and put them on the market, meaning prices will
be very high, and supply will be very low. This means that there
will not be enough liquidity for a true "market" to form, just
occasional transactions not much different from the grey market
today. And IPv6 addresses will remain 100% free of charge which
will reduce demand, i.e. potential buyers might prefer to spend 
their cash on IPv6 capability knowing that it frees them from the
need to participate in a dubious IPv4 market scheme.

Not to mention the negative effects of an increase in the number
of small routes in the Internet routing table. You might pay
half a million dollars for a /24 only to find that ISPs will
not accept your route announcements. Yet another reason why
a registered IP address block, in itself, is not valuable enough
to buy or sell.

In any case, nothing is decided before the meeting in Denver
on the 6th to 9th of April 2008. In fact, even then it won't be
decided, just past the first hurdle. 

If you or anyone really is interested in such things, pro or con,
then you should join the ARIN PPML list here
<http://lists.arin.net/mailman/listinfo/ppml>

--Michael Dillon