IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit

Sat Feb 23 03:02:10 UTC 2008

Hi Iljitsch,

Thanks for your response.

On Feb 23, 2008, at 1:38 AM, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:

> On 22 feb 2008, at 16:41, Tom Vest wrote:
>
>>> You can download files with all the delegation info from  
>>> ftp.arin.net.
>
>> You mean the stats files, which provide delegation date, type,  
>> starting number, length, etc.?
>
> Yes.
>
>> Which one of the published fields is the key field that enables  
>> you to identify the common recipient(s) of successive delegations  
>> over time?
>
> There is no such field.

I didn't think so. So there is no accurate way to get anything like a  
sum of IP address per LIR at any point in time, now or in the the  
past, at least not using publicly available data. Given that  
impossibility, I still don't see how anyone can make the  
(increasingly oft repeated) claim that 90% (or any specific share) of  
address space is now going to some subset of the LIRs... no?

>>> No, simply because large ISPs need lots of addresses, everyone  
>>> else can make do with just a few.
>
>> But in the absence of some other metric for largeness, that sounds  
>> like a tautology. Large ISPs are the ones that demand lots of  
>> addresses... ergo to demand a lot of addresses is to be large...
>
> You've got a point there. However, I think many of us will be able  
> to judge ISP size from other factors and observe that the  
> correlation by the such determined ISP size and address use is  
> quite high.

I agree that many of us can estimate ISP size even more accurately,  
by looking at the sum of address space originated by well-known ASes  
associated with those ISPs. I think many of us will recognize that  
there may be other, less well-known ASes associated with some of  
these, and so an accounting of the well-known ones is incomplete,  
perhaps a lower bound. I agree that some of us can correlate the  
contents of the routing table over time with the entries in the  
delegated files, to get very loose inter-temporal (delegation- 
origination) associations, which have been shaped over time in opaque  
ways by M&A, multihoming, customer management and traffic engineering  
engineering practices, etc. However, I still haven't seen anything  
that enables one to penetrate this fog of largely unknowable  
commercial and operational details sufficiently to justify the 90%  
claim -- or any other claim.

If there is some known method for doing this, and hence some  
defensible way to derive the actual (maybe 90%?) ratio, then I'd  
still be very interested to hear about it! I think all of the  
academics who spent several years trying (with mixed results) to come  
up with algorithms for inferring inter-AS relationships, etc. would  
be very interested too!

Thanks,

TV