IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit

Tue Feb 19 22:42:12 UTC 2008

David Conrad wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 
  ...

> 
> 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.

A collaborative bottom-up consensus-based policy determination framework 
  is a ponderous ship that turns ... [etc]. The problem is not 
necessarily in the machine room that implements these address allocation 
policies but in the process of determining policies that all interested 
parties can live with. It takes time. Probably more time than you have left.

So even if there are a flurry of last minute policy proposals to salvage 
the situation it may well be a case of too little too late.

>>> The  question is how ARIN will deal with the market after the IPv4 
>>> free  pool exhausts.

I would suggest that the real question is "How will industry deal with 
the situation when the current supply streams for IPv4 vaporize?"

And the secondary question is "Will the industry's reaction to this 
shift in the supply of addresses destroy the integrity and utility of 
the entire IPv4 space?"

What I'm gettting at is that if there is no mechanism in whatever 
industry does for address supply after the unallocated pool exhausts to 
preserve the essential attribute of the address system, namely 
uniqueness of use, and we start to see competing claims to be able to 
use addresses without any agreed framework of resolution, then what 
happens to the Internet? Do we all just originate whatever addresses we 
feel like on the day in to the routing system?

> 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>.

indeed.

  Geoff