"It's the end of the world as we know it" -- REM

Wed Apr 24 17:33:16 UTC 2013

* Andrew Latham

> If I can walk around a smallish town and point at 5 businesses like
> this its a possible solution.  I am not claiming a few /24s will do, I
> am claiming that there are many (for larger values of many) companies
> like this.

There are certainly several thousands or even millions of unused IPv4
addresses in existence. But reclaiming and redistributing it, which
would be a colossal undertaking, would only push back IPv4 depletion by
a few months. It's simply not worth the effort.

>>> I have already read the news of blackmarket sales of network
>>> allocations in Europe.
>>
>> Interesting. Do you have a link or some other kind of reference?
> 
> I did a quick search and they are easy to find. Many news articles
> about Microsoft buying network allocations at auction to set a price
> of ~$11USD per IP. One tangent article that I liked was

Sure, there's a market all right. However, the well publicised
Microsoft/Nortel transfer wasn't a "black market" transfer, it was done
in accordance with the ARIN community's policies. Straight from the
horse's mouth:

https://www.arin.net/about_us/media/releases/20110415.html

Such transfers are also permitted by the community's policies in the
RIPE region, and the NCC maintains a public list of all such
legit/"white" transfers that have taken place:

https://www.ripe.net/lir-services/resource-management/ipv4-transfers/table-of-transfers

>
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2012/07/16/ipv4-addresses-now-driving-hosting-deals/

This article mentions a "black market", but it falls short of providing
any tangible evidence that it really exists, or to what extent - it
appears to me to be more speculation and conjecture than anything else.

That said - such speculation may well turn out to be correct, of course,
and being involved in the RIPE community I'm genuinely interested in the
topic. Therefore I was hoping you'd point me in the direction of "the
news of blackmarket sales of network allocations in Europe" you
mentioned you have read.

Tore