[NANOG] fair warning: less than 1000 days left to IPv4

Mon May 5 03:21:28 UTC 2008

On May 4, 2008, at 11:37 AM, Tomas L. Byrnes wrote:
> The artifact of MIT and others
> having /8s while the entire Indian subcontinent scrapes for /29s, can
> hardly be considered optimal or right.

While perhaps intended as hyperbole, this sort of statement annoys me  
as it demonstrates an ignorance of how address allocation mechanisms  
work.  It may be the case that organizations in India (usually people  
cite China, but whatever) might "scrape for /29s", but that is not  
because of a lack of address space at APNIC, but rather policies  
imposed by the carrier(s)/PTT/government.

> It's time for the supposedly
> altruistic good guys to do the right thing, and give back the  
> resources
> they are not using, that are sorely needed.

"For the good of the Internet" died some while back. There is  
currently no incentive for anyone with more address space than they  
need to return that address space.

> How about they resell it and
> use the money to make getting an education affordable?

If you believe this appropriate, I suggest you raise it on  
ppml at arin.net and see what sort of reaction you get.

> The routing prefix problem, OTOH, is an artificial shortage caused by
> (mostly one) commercial entities maximizing their bottom line
> [...]
> Especially if those end-points are relatively stable as to
> connectivity, the allocations are non-portable, and you aggregate.

A free market doesn't work like that, prefixes aren't stable, and the  
problem is that you can't aggregate.  If you're actually interested in  
this topic, I might suggest looking at the IRTF RRG working group  
archives.

> IPv4 has enough addresses for every computer on Earth, and then some.

Unless you NAT out every bodily orifice, not even close.

Regards,
-drc