Market-based address allocation

Thu May 1 17:27:05 UTC 2003

Treating IP space as a commodity is no more strange than trading financial
options or other derivatives, or, for that matter, intellectual property.
Bits, numbers, and agreements all hold value outside of the context of
purely physical property.

Sadly, this sort of idea tends to stomp on the socialistic sort of
idealism that is particularly prevalent amongst some in the IETF and NANOG
communities, who feel it would leave out the "little guys". I suspect that
any real world float of IP address space would result in a pretty low
price per ip address, if the market was sufficiently liquid. It might be
cheaper for a little guy to get a few $K together for IPs, then to build a
network capable of "justifying" a /20 from an RIR.

Maybe ARIN should reinvent itself as a mercantile exchange?

- Dan

On Wed, 30 Apr 2003 bmanning at karoshi.com wrote:

>
> >
> >
> > On Wednesday, April 30, 2003, at 07:44  AM, 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.
> >
> > PIARA, The Sequel.  Take N+1.  Action!  Anybody got any rubber balls
> > Peter Lothberg can monopolize this time? :-)
>
> 	I still have mine, plus the five or six I took away from
> 	the others in the room.  ...  psst, buddy, want to buy an
> 	"8"
>
> > Sorry to be flip.  In case you haven't already, see:
> > http://www.apnic.net/mailing-lists/piara/index.shtml
>
> 	Oh... sorry, are folks really seriously wanting
> 	to treat integers as a marketable commodity?
>
> >
> > Rgds,
> > -drc
> >
>
>