IPv6 news

Thu Oct 13 14:03:22 UTC 2005

On Thu, 13 Oct 2005 Michael.Dillon at btradianz.com wrote:

>>> 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?
>>
>> I, for one, would be very interesting in such a system.  Distribution of
>
>> commodities is almost universally done best by capital markets.
>
> There is a slight problem here. Commodities are things which
> are bought and sold. In other words, one party has legal
> title to the commodity and transfers that legal title to
> another party. Since nobody has legal title to any IPv4
> addresses, nobody can sell them in the first place.

That's exactly the change I've been advocating for years.  Instead of 
continuing with this socialistic concept that IP space is somehow owned by 
everyone, we should, instead, give title for IP space and allow those 
titles to be bought and sold freely.  Classic economics teaches of the 
tragedy of the commons.  I can't think of too many things that look more 
like a commons than the current IP space.  By my own best estimates, 50% 
of the allocated space today is wasted in one way or another, either it 
is used inefficiently by staticly addressing things that don't need to be 
static, hoarded to prevent organizations from having to make additional 
requests to an RIR, or legacy assignments where the orgs that have them 
have no incentive to give them up.  Almost all of the exhaustion problems 
that are on the horizon are being directly caused by inefficient use of 
this scarce resource, certainly all of the above is solved by a capital 
market.

> Of course you can get around this by selling the networks
> that use the IPv4 addresses, but then you are getting
> away from the realm of commodities. A commodity is a
> fairly generic product and networks are far from generic.

Again, converting to a capitalistic system is how we can stop this 
underhanded practice.

-- 
Brandon Ross                                              AIM:  BrandonNRoss
Director, Network Engineering                             ICQ:  2269442
Internap                           Skype:  brandonross  Yahoo:  BrandonNRoss