IPv6 news

Wed Oct 12 20:38:53 UTC 2005

On Wed, Oct 12, 2005 at 03:20:31PM -0400, Daniel Golding wrote:
> 
> On 10/12/05 3:13 PM, "Randy Bush" <randy at psg.com> wrote:
> 
> > 
> > geoff's predictions for a very lively market in v4 space will
> > seriously come into play.
> 
> Maybe its time to have a serious talk about IPv4 commodity trading schemes.
> Anyone interested in this enough to have a BOF at ARIN/NANOG?
> 
> This could extend the lifetime of the IPv4 space significantly by promoting
> efficient use through economic incentives, provide positive economic
> incentives to move to v6 when needed, and eliminate the grey market.
> 
> Proper controls could be put into place to prevent de-aggregation through
> utilization of the RIRs as clearing houses.

First of all, I'm still waiting to be convinced that there is actually an 
IP shortage at all. From the latest routing table analysis dump to nanog:

    Percentage of available address space announced:               38.6
    Percentage of allocated address space announced:               58.1
    Percentage of available address space allocated:               66.4

>From where I sit, the perceived shortage is due to non-existant 
reclamation of unused resources, and financial incentives to create an 
artificial shortage. As much as I like to see capitalism solve problems, I 
don't think that opening up a market in selling legacy allocations is 
going to make things better.

It is one thing to have a legacy allocation sitting around "just incase", 
when the only value is reduced annoyance if you ever need to get more IP 
space in the future. It is another thing to have the allocation actually 
be worth something monitarily, and potentially worth a big something if 
you can manage to hold onto it until there is a REAL shortage (maybe even 
one that a legacy allocation owner can help create if they have any policy 
control, wink wink nudge nudge). Capitalism can only sort things out when 
there is a truely open market, which I don't think describes this 
situation at all.

All I see is that in 3-4 years we will actually have to engage our 
collective brains again and start getting new IP allocations from a 
different source. It's not an exhaustion of IPv4 at all, it is just a next 
step in the evolution of the Internet. Call it recycling if you will.

Investing a little bit of time and effort into figuring out the 
reclamation process now would save us a lot of grief a few years down the 
road. Why don't we start by going after the low hanging fruit, and 
pressure some non-corporate entities like the US government to return some 
of its legacy unused /8 allocations. I'm certain that someone with some 
historical BGP data could put together an analysis of who has not used 
their IP allocations at ALL within the last few years, still more low 
hanging fruit which we can take care of now. Of course, the last time I 
mentioned an unused /8 which should have been returned years ago on this 
list, the party in question started announcing it in BGP the next day.

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)