Market-based address allocation

Wed Apr 30 20:45:29 UTC 2003

In message <3EB03565.1040202 at brightok.net>, Jack Bates writes:
>
>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
>
>
See http://www.research.att.com/~smb/papers/piara/index.html for a 
paper on the subject.  (We held a BoF at the IETF many years ago; there 
was sufficient pushback that we didn't pursue the question.)


		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb (me)
		http://www.wilyhacker.com (2nd edition of "Firewalls" book)