Independent space from ARIN

Mon Apr 14 21:57:34 UTC 2003

On 4/14/2003 at 17:27:20 -0400, Brandon Ross said:
> On Mon, 14 Apr 2003, Dave Israel wrote:
> 
> > There's a lot more available real estate than available v4 address
> > space.  That's the biggest one.
> 
> Is there?  How much address space would be available if it were utilized
> efficiently by everyone?  Once you put a price tag on it, organizations
> become the models of efficiency in utilization.  If you can use NAT, you
> will, if you can't, you'll only assign unique addresses to
> users/applications that absolutly require it.  If you don't like those
> options, maybe you'll move to v6.  I just don't see a problem here.

Ah, but when you buy address space, are you going to be happy about
giving it back when you change providers?  Will the provider give you
a fair price on selling it back?  Do you think sales departments won't
insist you buy their address space when you connect?  And if you can
keep it, it makes the routing table more and more interesting.

> > Second, groups that make the Internet go aren't necessarily the ones who
> > can afford the address space.
> 
> If they can't afford the address space, there's a very good chance it's
> because they are inefficient and they should be done away with.  Besides,
> I just don't see address space being prohibitively expensive on an open
> market, as a previous poster pointed out, only a minority of address space
> is currently announced in the Internet.  I'd bet at least half of that
> isn't used at all, and I'd bet another half of that is unnecessary.

That's a pretty brash thing to say on Merit's mail server.  Much of
the research and coordination of the Internet is done by research
groups and universities.  It isn't inefficiency that keeps their
available cash for address space down; it is the nature of their
business.  

> > But really, you just need the first one: small space.  The relatively
> > small pool means that a large company with lots of money could buy the
> > whole ARIN chunk of the Internet.
> 
> There are a large number of organizations with more addres space than they
> need.  The chances of any one company buying all the address space and
> then just sitting on it are nil.  Why would their investors allow them to
> sit on a asset and not make any income on it?  They would have to compete
> with the likes of GE, ATT, MIT, and Genuity for sales of the address space
> they already hold.

Who said they would just sit on it?  Why not make the Internet 
now "The Internet, Brought To You By Company X?"  You need Company
X's address space, so you have to provide Company X's services on
Company X's operating system?

It's this kind of thing that keeps areas of the radio spectrum
licensed by the government.

-Dave