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Re: IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit

  • From: Owen DeLong
  • Date: Tue Feb 19 12:16:11 2008


On Feb 19, 2008, at 8:47 AM, Joe Maimon wrote:




David Conrad wrote:

Joe,
On Feb 19, 2008, at 4:28 AM, Joe Maimon wrote:
When IANA free pool exhaustion happens or even appears to be imminent, one can expect push for allocation policies to be changed drastically towards the miserly.
No.
You might see a push towards this, but it will take far longer to get policies modified than there will be time left and there will be increased 'competition' among the RIRs that will strongly discourage this course of action (as someone who has proposed a policy that would impose more restrictions on v4 allocations, I have already heard the "if we modify our policies to be more conservative, then the folks in other RIRs will get an advantage" several times).

Things might get different when the end is staring us in the face.

By then, the policy process will take too long to be meaningful.

The RIR bureaucracy is a ponderous ship that turns very slowly and has multiple captains who do not necessarily agree on the direction to turn. IPv4 allocation policy revisions aren't going to save us.

RIR's have bylaws about emergency policies, dont they?

Yes, but, I think it is unlikely, at least in ARIN's case that the BoT will consider runout an emergency.

Its not about saving, its about prolonging the end and how long that migh be expected to last.

Prolonging the end in terms of tightening requirements is just a question of deciding who to fail
to serve. Do you fail to serve those who came first, or, do you punish those who come first and
serve only those who meet some other arbitrary criteria? What arbitrary criteria would you
suggest be used to decide who should not receive service?

Furthermore, I expect more credence will be lent to the reclaiming efforts, and pre-RIR swamp space has lots of candidates.
What incentive to a holder of early allocations is there to return address space voluntarily?

None, but the nice thing about being a registry is that reclaiming things is as simple as allocating it to somebody else. Buyer beware and all that.

This would create significant legal challenges and costs. Likely, the legacy holders would prevail
in many cases, and, you just might find that becomes the excuse that congress needs to hand over
management of the IP space to the ITU. I don't see that as a good scenario at all. By the time the
legal challenges were resolved, the ISPs receiving such allocations would be long-since out of
business due to the inability to provide reliable service to their customers.

And in the absence of any other method of obtaining ipv4, I would expect RIR mebership to push for aggressive reclamation, with policy change to make it worthwhile.

The RIR membership doesn't necessarily have standing to do much about legacy holders other
than what the legacy holders themselves choose to agree to. You are assuming that the RIR
has power that is, as yet, untested, unproven, and, unlikely.


Class-E,
Efforts to redefine class E have stalled because there is simply no way it can be used for anything other than private space.

Amazing that so much effort can go into ipv6 but nobody can spare a few hours per product to remove a couple lines of code?

Different entities and a belief that IPv6 is the correct solution on the part of those in a position
to do so. Class E would actually not buy very much time, either.


There are too many implementations out there that will never be modified (e.g., Windows 98) on which you can't even configure class E space.

Faced with a choice of ipv6 and no ipv4 or ipv6 and class-e ipv4, which would you choose? Not like windows98 (if there are any still around that mean anything to anybody) has ipv6 either.

True. So, this will probably create the mandate for W98 to go away. I don't see this as a bad thing.
As it stands now, anyone who wants can try and use class-e IPv4. However, I don't expect any RIR
to be handing it out with guaranteed uniqueness any time soon.

rfc3330 and similar reclamation might occur as well.
IANA recently reclaimed 14/8. I think that added 3 _weeks_ to the expected runout date. That was likely the last "easily" reclaimable block.

Reclamation efforts without policy change isnt profitable and would only become so if miser mode is in effect.

I haven't seen you propose a policy change that would affect this. While you're too late for the Denver meeting,
you are welcome to submit a policy to ARIN if you think policy can resolve this.

The question is how ARIN will deal with the market after the IPv4 free pool exhausts.

I expect the value will skyrocket, whether on the black, grey or white market.
Yep. And the question is: as an ISP or other address consuming organization, what will you do when the cost of obtaining IPv4 addresses skyrockets?

Pass it on to the customer. Reclaim. Scavenge. Engineer more nats and workarounds while accelerating ipv6. Get budget and manpower to actually make changes. Drag the users kicking and screaming, cause thats what it will take.

Yep... All of these will probably occur.

So far, as far as I can tell, the answer to that question (in most cases) has been putting hands over ears and saying "La la la" loudly. See <http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/020608-ipv4-address-depletion.html >.

Things will likely be different in 2010

True. The question is not whether things will change, but, how they will change. This is a much harder
question. For now, all that we know is that few people are paying attention to the problem, and, that the
problem will get progressively harder to solve the longer that behavior persists.


Owen