Market-based address allocation

Wed Apr 30 20:43:17 UTC 2003

Bill Nickless wrote:

> 
> As a thought experiment, think of how the IPv4 addressing situation 
> (bogon advertisements, allocations, explosion of routing table sizes, 
> etc) would be different if the IP community treated IP addresses as a 
> commodity.

Actually, your entire argument starts off very poorly. You are stating 
that IP addresses should be treated as a commodity, yet what you are 
really trying to state is that routing advertisements should be treated 
as a commodity. These are two different concepts. If we pay for IP 
addresses, there's still nothing to keep us from advertising longer 
prefixes. If we pay for advertisements, large providers will just work 
it into their peering agreements and then collect money from their 
customers for their adverts.You'd also have to figure out who pays who? 
Do I get paid for every route sent to me? I usually have 120,000+ routes 
sitting in my router. Please send me my money.

If you aren't refering to advertisements, then bogon advertisements, 
hijackings, and route table explosions will still be an issue. Without 
mandating necessity, I'd also point out that there would no longer be 
IPv4 address space available except at outrageous prices for smaller 
networks that wish to multi-home and have their own netblocks.

-Jack