IPV4 as a Commodity for Profit

Fri Feb 22 17:38:58 UTC 2008

On 22 feb 2008, at 16:41, Tom Vest wrote:

>> You can download files with all the delegation info from  
>> ftp.arin.net.

> You mean the stats files, which provide delegation date, type,  
> starting number, length, etc.?

Yes.

> Which one of the published fields is the key field that enables you  
> to identify the common recipient(s) of successive delegations over  
> time?

There is no such field.

>> No, simply because large ISPs need lots of addresses, everyone else  
>> can make do with just a few.

> But in the absence of some other metric for largeness, that sounds  
> like a tautology. Large ISPs are the ones that demand lots of  
> addresses... ergo to demand a lot of addresses is to be large...

You've got a point there. However, I think many of us will be able to  
judge ISP size from other factors and observe that the correlation by  
the such determined ISP size and address use is quite high.

To turn things around: does anyone know about a significant amount of  
address space (say, a block of a million or so or more) going to an  
entity that isn't an ISP of some sort in the past 5 years?