shim6 @ NANOG (forwarded note from John Payne)

Fri Mar 3 16:04:07 UTC 2006

Thus spake "Iljitsch van Beijnum" <iljitsch at muada.com>
> On 3-mrt-2006, at 0:22, Mark Newton wrote:
>> Right now we can hand them out to anyone who demonstrates a need
>> for them.  When they run out we'll need to be able to reallocate
>> address blocks which have already been handed out from orgs who
>> perhaps don't need them as much as they thought they did to orgs
>> which need them more.
>
>> Sounds like a marketplace to me.  How much do you think a /24 is
>> worth?  How many microseconds do you think it'll take for members
>> of each RIR to debate the policy changes needed to alter their
>> rules to permit trading of IPv4 resource allocations once IANA
>> says, "No!" for the first time?
>
> This is what I wrote about this a couple of months ago: http:// 
> ablog.apress.com/?p=835
>
> An interesting aspect about address trading is that some  organizations 
> have huge amounts of address space which didn't cost  them anything, or at 
> least not significantly more than what smaller  blocks of address space 
> cost others. Having them pocket the proceeds  strikes me as rather unfair, 
> and also counter productive because it  encourages hoarding. Maybe a 
> system where ARIN and other RIRs buy  back addresses for a price per bit 
> prefix length rather than per  address makes sense.

Keep in mind that current RIR allocations/assignments are effectively leases 
(though the RIRs deny that fact) and, like any landlord, they can refuse to 
renew a lease or increase the rent at any point.

There might be some interesting political battles when it comes to legacy 
allocations which are currently rent-free, but those tenants will find 
themselves woefully outnumbered when that day comes.

>> We'll also have a reasonably good idea of what it'd cost to perform  an 
>> IPv6 migration as we gather feedback from orgs who have
>> actually done it.
>
> I don't think the cost is too relevant (and hard to calculate because  a 
> lot of it is training and other not easily quantified  expenditures), what 
> counts is what it buys you. I ran a web bug for a  non-networking related 
> page in Dutch for a while and some 0.16% of  all requests were done over 
> IPv6. (That's 1 in 666.) So even if it's  free, deploying IPv6 today isn't 
> all that useful. But when you're the  last one running IPv4, you'll really 
> want to move over to IPv6, even  if it's very expensive.

Ah, but why?  As long as IPv4 has similar or better performance 
characteristics to IPv6, why would anyone _need_ to migrate?  Add to that 
the near certainty that vendors will create NAT devices that will allow an 
entire v4 enterprise to reach the v6 Internet...

S

Stephen Sprunk        "Stupid people surround themselves with smart
CCIE #3723           people.  Smart people surround themselves with
K5SSS         smart people who disagree with them."  --Aaron Sorkin 