IPv4 address block

Sat Jan 13 14:39:28 UTC 2024

Matthew Petach wrote on 13/01/2024 00:27:
> In light of that, I strongly suspect that a second go-around at 
> developing more beneficial post-exhaustion policies might turn out 
> very differently than it did when many of us were naively thinking
> we understood how people would behave in a post-exhaustion world.

Naah, any future relitigation would end up the same if new ipv4 
addresses fell out of the sky and became available. The ipv4 address 
market turned out exactly like most people suspected: it was a market; 
people bought and sold addresses; the addresses cost money; there 
were/are some sharks; life moved on.

> If you limit each requesting organization to a /22 per year, we can 
> keep the internet mostly functional for decades to come,

at least in the ripe ncc service region, all this proved was that if the 
cost of registering a company (or LIR) and applying for an allocation 
was lower than the market rate of ipv4 addresses, then people would do that.

The root problem is unavoidable: ipv4 is a scarce resource with an 
inherent demand. Every policy designed to mitigate against this will 
create workarounds, and the more valuable the resource, the more 
inventive the workaround.

In terms of hard landings vs soft landings, what will make ipv6 succeed 
is how compelling ipv6 is, rather than whether someone created a policy 
to make ipv4 less palatable. In particular, any effect from a hard 
landing compared would have been ephemeral.

Nick