IPv4 address exchange

Tue Apr 19 03:47:31 UTC 2011

On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 10:35 PM, David Conrad <drc at virtualized.org> wrote:
> And yet, Ron has recently raged on this list about hijacked prefixes used for spamming, so clearly "no transit network" is inaccurate.

I try to qualify my remarks when necessary.  In this case, I wrote
"except by act of omission/mistake," and you evidently did not read
that carefully, or have construed "transit network" to mean any
two-bit ISP with one BGP customer (or shell company downstream of
them), rather than serious, global networks.

> Regardless, for sake of argument, let's assume ARIN refused to recognize the Microsoft/Nortel sale and Microsoft deploys a few prefixes of those 666K addresses for (say) new MSN services. Do you think ISPs, particularly the larger ones, all over the world would refuse to accept those announcements (especially when their call centers start getting calls from irate customers who aren't able to gain access to MSN services)?

ARIN has very carefully allowed our industry to largely avoid this
choice, as InterNIC did before.  Their methods have sometimes been
objectionable, but the devil we know is better than the devil we
don't.

>> 1) no "regulator" at all, thus BGP anarchy (we came surprisingly close to that in the 1990s at least once)
>
> And the solution to that "BGP anarchy" (by which I assume you mean a flood of long prefixes)

No, I mean if ARIN had lost its perceived or actual legitimacy, and
networks really were able to "permanently hijack" whatever IPs they
decided to claim for themselves, we would have had anarchy at worst,
or more likely, transit-free ISPs with commercial interest in
customers not having portable address space controlling all
allocations of portable addresses.

This almost happened.

> We're talking about IPv4 addresses which will (soon) be unavailable

I'm not confused about that.  If it were up to me, I would simply
freeze all IPv4 allocations immediately.  I do not think the current
sale-and-transfer scheme is good.  I also don't *care* that much,
because the more screwed up the "legacy IPv4 Internet" becomes, and
the faster it gets there, the better it is for my business.  I'm
pretty sure I am not alone in this thinking.

-- 
Jeff S Wheeler <jsw at inconcepts.biz>
Sr Network Operator  /  Innovative Network Concepts