IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit

Tue Feb 19 16:20:13 UTC 2008

Joe,

On Feb 19, 2008, at 4:28 AM, Joe Maimon wrote:
> When IANA free pool exhaustion happens or even appears to be  
> imminent, one can expect push for allocation policies to be changed  
> drastically towards the miserly.

No.

You might see a push towards this, but it will take far longer to get  
policies modified than there will be time left and there will be  
increased 'competition' among the RIRs that will strongly discourage  
this course of action (as someone who has proposed a policy that would  
impose more restrictions on v4 allocations, I have already heard the  
"if we modify our policies to be more conservative, then the folks in  
other RIRs will get an advantage" several times).

The RIR bureaucracy is a ponderous ship that turns very slowly and has  
multiple captains who do not necessarily agree on the direction to  
turn.  IPv4 allocation policy revisions aren't going to save us.

> Furthermore, I expect more credence will be lent to the reclaiming  
> efforts, and pre-RIR swamp space has lots of candidates.

What incentive to a holder of early allocations is there to return  
address space voluntarily?

> Class-E,

Efforts to redefine class E have stalled because there is simply no  
way it can be used for anything other than private space.  There are  
too many implementations out there that will never be modified (e.g.,  
Windows 98) on which you can't even configure class E space.

> rfc3330 and similar reclamation might occur as well.

IANA recently reclaimed 14/8.  I think that added 3 _weeks_ to the  
expected runout date.  That was likely the last "easily" reclaimable  
block.

>> The  question is how ARIN will deal with the market after the IPv4  
>> free  pool exhausts.
> I expect the value will skyrocket, whether on the black, grey or  
> white market.

Yep.  And the question is: as an ISP or other address consuming  
organization, what will you do when the cost of obtaining IPv4  
addresses skyrockets?  So far, as far as I can tell, the answer to  
that question (in most cases) has been putting hands over ears and  
saying "La la la" loudly.  See <http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/020608-ipv4-address-depletion.html 
 >.

Regards,
-drc