IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit

Mon Feb 18 23:17:47 UTC 2008

On Mon, 18 Feb 2008 12:18:10 -0800
David Conrad <drc at virtualized.org> wrote:

> 
> Michael,
> 
> On Feb 18, 2008, at 10:15 AM, <michael.dillon at bt.com>
> <michael.dillon at bt.com 
>  > wrote:
> > We cannot possibly hope to create
> > a market within the next two years which is beneficial to
> > the Internet network operations industry.
> 
> A market will exist whether or not "we" want to create it and it  
> doesn't matter how long lived it is.  Without some form of
> regulation (a bit hard since it would need to be applied globally),
> it is almost certain it will be extremely painful and folks who
> "shouldn't" make lots of money will.  So it goes.

Yah.  A market exists today, though it's perforce sub rosa.

An interesting operational question is how to prevent deaggregation as
a result of a market.  If, say, a company isn't using half of its
address space, could it sell that half, to several other parties?  Can
that be prevented by market means?

See http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/piara/index.html for a paper
I and some others wrote some years ago on these topics.

		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb