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

Thu Apr 25 16:11:27 UTC 2013

On Thu, 25 Apr 2013, John Levine wrote:

> Once people realize that there's no more free v4 space to be had, or 
> only little bits, that the market will develop and a lot of space will 
> appear for sale.  For example, there's an educational insitution near 
> Boston that's sitting on a /8.  If the price for a clean /12 turns out 
> to be $5M, which I don't think is implausible, it'll be mighty tempting 
> for them to renumber into one /12 and sell off the others for a quick 
> $75 million.

There is a lot of speculation what IPv4 addresses are worth, I've been 
hearing everything from a few USD to 20 EUR per address.

If it's 20 EUR per address, then I agree with you that there will be a lot 
of addresses available for sale because it'll now all of a sudden be 
worthwile to renumber, start using IPv6 with NAT64, or something else, and 
get rid of your now excess IPv4 addresses. Most organisations will 
probably be able to do this with costs ranging in 0.1 - a few million 
dollars.

I like this because it makes the incentive to move to IPv6 so much higher. 
IPv4 is a dead end, the stone is bled dry, the earlier people realise this 
and move on, the better.

> I entirely realize that the sound of people yelling that it's totally 
> unfair that other people got their space for free and now they have to 
> pay will be deafening.  Too bad.  Back in the early 90s I missed the 
> cutoff to get my own unjustified /24 by about six months, but I've been 
> able to deal with it.

If there is no upside for people holding addresses to spend time/money to 
free them up, these addresses won't get freed up and transferred.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se