Hello
the article here
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/021308-ipv6-delay.html is an
interesting read given the current state of IPv4 depletion/IPv6 conversion
operational climate.
As it is indicated, it's a proposal and there are considerations as to
whether it makes things better or worse.
Regards
Raymond Macharia
the article here
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/021308-ipv6-delay.html
is an interesting read given the current state of IPv4
depletion/IPv6 conversion operational climate.
As it is indicated, it's a proposal and there are
considerations as to whether it makes things better or worse.
Not sure what proposal this article refers to. The proposals
under discussion are posted here
<http://www.arin.net/policy/proposals/proposal_archive.html>
Note that all kinds of crazy ideas get proposed to ARIN and
most of them never see the light of day. If you carefully read
the Adopted and Abandoned proposals listed on the ARIN page
you will see that the Adopted ones tend to be incremental
improvements, not radical change.
In the case of this "address commodity" idea, most people believe
that it will not do much, if anything, to mitigate the effects
of running out of IPv4 addresses which will hit us in about
two years from now. It is too costly for companies to free
up addresses and put them on the market, meaning prices will
be very high, and supply will be very low. This means that there
will not be enough liquidity for a true "market" to form, just
occasional transactions not much different from the grey market
today. And IPv6 addresses will remain 100% free of charge which
will reduce demand, i.e. potential buyers might prefer to spend
their cash on IPv6 capability knowing that it frees them from the
need to participate in a dubious IPv4 market scheme.
Not to mention the negative effects of an increase in the number
of small routes in the Internet routing table. You might pay
half a million dollars for a /24 only to find that ISPs will
not accept your route announcements. Yet another reason why
a registered IP address block, in itself, is not valuable enough
to buy or sell.
In any case, nothing is decided before the meeting in Denver
on the 6th to 9th of April 2008. In fact, even then it won't be
decided, just past the first hurdle.
If you or anyone really is interested in such things, pro or con,
then you should join the ARIN PPML list here
<http://lists.arin.net/mailman/listinfo/ppml>
--Michael Dillon
a message of 47 lines which said:
The proposals under discussion are posted here
<http://www.arin.net/policy/proposals/proposal_archive.html>
The ones that were already screened. The policy the OP is talking
about seems to be this one, not yet screened:
http://lists.arin.net/pipermail/ppml/2008-February/009978.html
The ones that were already screened. The policy the OP is
talking about seems to be this one, not yet screened:
That's the one. And if you go down to the very bottom of the
message and click on [thread] you will be able to read through
all the discussion to date regarding this proposal.
--Michael Dillon
the article here
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/021308-ipv6-delay.html
is an interesting read given the current state of IPv4
depletion/IPv6 conversion operational climate.
As it is indicated, it’s a proposal and there are
considerations as to whether it makes things better or worse.
Not sure what proposal this article refers to. The proposals
under discussion are posted here
<http://www.arin.net/policy/proposals/proposal_archive.html>
Only after they are accepted by the AC as a formal proposal
and assigned a number.
The article is referring to a proposal submitted by the ARIN AC
which, if adopted, would allow for organizations to transfer
address space to other organizations under dramatically
different circumstances than are allowed today.
That policy proposal is available here:
http://lists.arin.net/pipermail/ppml/2008-February/009978.html
Not to mention the negative effects of an increase in the number
of small routes in the Internet routing table. You might pay
half a million dollars for a /24 only to find that ISPs will
not accept your route announcements. Yet another reason why
a registered IP address block, in itself, is not valuable enough
to buy or sell.
Actually, the proposed policy provides significant limits to
the de-aggregation which can be done in its current form.
In any case, nothing is decided before the meeting in Denver
on the 6th to 9th of April 2008. In fact, even then it won’t be
decided, just past the first hurdle.
True. However, there is also a NANOG BoF where several
members of the ARIN AC will be present to get input from
the community on the subject of this proposal, and, other
ideas/strategies for IPv4 after IANA free pool exhaustion.
The BoF will be in the Crystal Room from 4:00 PM to
5:30 PM on Tuesday, Feb. 19.
Owen DeLong
ARIN AC
Distribution:
This “idea” comes from clueless individuals who want to know “who owns the Internet”? When I worked at Enron Broadband Services “the crooked E”, management wanted to buy PSInet so that “we” could developed a trading desk for IP address blocks.
We informed management that neither EBS or PSInet owned their IP addresses but rented them from ARIN. And when the organization indicates that IP addresses are no longer needed, they can be returned to ARIN or ARIN can come and get them from the organization per ARIN AUP and other policies that users signed when making a request to ARIN. (Review a court case several years ago, about a company going into bankruptcy, I believe, claiming that “their” IP addresses were part of the assets of the company…)
Now for those who could not follow the last paragraph, the analogy is when you were young and renting your apartment or house and you wanted to make money selling one of the rooms of your rented apartment or house.
So anyone with spare /16 or larger send the blocks back to ARIN so they can be good stewards of the diminishing resource.
John (ISDN) Lee
I Still Don’t kNow
It Suites Dennis’s Needs
Hi John,
I think that comment is way out of line. In fact, I met at LINX one of authors of a trading proposal. They are smart, well educated individuals.
Markets have proven to be excellent mechanisms for allocating resources fairness is a distinct issue) and might be the medication required given the apparent hoarding of IP addresses.
Nor is the trading of IP addresses inconsistent with ARIN ownership.
Regards,
Roderick S. Beck
Director of European Sales
Hibernia Atlantic
1, Passage du Chantier, 75012 Paris
http://www.hiberniaatlantic.com
Wireless: 1-212-444-8829.
Landline: 33-1-4346-3209.
French Wireless: 33-6-14-33-48-97.
AOL Messenger: GlobalBandwidth
rod.beck@hiberniaatlantic.com
rodbeck@erols.com
``Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.’’ Albert Einstein.
Markets have a history of efficiently allocating resources, this much is true. My concern is when IP allocations are based on fiscal merit instead of technical merit. Also, don’t forget speculators within a market. Do you really want the price of IP blocks bid up by “IP day traders”?
-brandon
I suppose that this is easier said than done. I doubt whether those
"hording" IP space all allocate them in a uniform contiguous manner so even
if there was sufficient monitory incentive I wonder whether it would be
worth it trying to renumber an entire network so as to "sell" a whole
contiguous block. This introduces the complexity that not just any IP block
will do but it has to satisfy certain conditions, which complicates things
even further.
The amount of disruptions in the process of renumbering would erode the
perceived gains very quickly.
But let us see what the meeting will yield.
Raymond Macharia
Head of Engineering
AccessKenya
Email: engineering@accesskenya.com
Web: http://www.accesskenya.com/
Communications Solutions Ltd
4th Floor | Museum Hill Centre
P.O. Box 43588 - 00100 | Nairobi
Hi Brand,
You want some speculators to create liquidity. At the same time you want to avoid the excessive trading that leads to speculative bubbles, whether is the equity bubble of 2000 or the real estate bubble of 2007.
I think the answer is that you need the ability to impose a transaction tax. For example, there is no real estate bubble in France because the one time costs of buying and selling are quite high.
A transaction tax would discourage excessive trading.
Bear in mind that I have devoted zero time to thinking how to construct such a market. 
Roderick S. Beck
Director of European Sales
Hibernia Atlantic
1, Passage du Chantier, 75012 Paris
http://www.hiberniaatlantic.com
Wireless: 1-212-444-8829.
Landline: 33-1-4346-3209.
French Wireless: 33-6-14-33-48-97.
AOL Messenger: GlobalBandwidth
rod.beck@hiberniaatlantic.com
rodbeck@erols.com
``Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.’’ Albert Einstein.
Thanks Rod,
The traders at Enron are/where PhDs with MBAs from Wharton, Harvard and Oxford, UK so well educated and smart was not the point of the comment. ARIN (and other RIRs) and the rules of use of IP address were specifically setup to allow global communications around the world with a large number of entities on an equal basis. IPv4 would be a fixed size pool of a commodity and from my training at Enron in trading (they were the largest in the world by number and volume of trades) it only works under several rules. You have a group of suppliers and consumers, you have a measurable commodity and a standard way of measuring it, you have a standard set of commodities, you can assign a value to the commodity etc.
If I grow corn or drill for “Texas Light Crude” there standards in place so that if you drill in the Middle east, China or Russia you produce the same “Texas Light Crude” to trade.
Trading of IP address does violate ARIN rules as ARIN has explained to me since to “Trade” something is to have title or ownership of that item and that ownership belongs to the cognizant RIR not to a company or person.
Regards
John
PS: The RIRs are community driven and so if the community wants to become a market place, they can petition ARIN have a vote and change if the majority of the community wants to.
Markets have a history of efficiently allocating resources, this much
is true.
Its only true when those markets have sufficient liquidity.
We have gotten used to regulated markets where the SEC
and others, make sure that liquidity is maintained and
block trading of instruments when liquidity is insufficient.
In order to be liquid, a market has to have a sufficiently
stable supply. If it is a commodity market, where the
instruments being traded are then consumed by the buyer
in producing their products or services, then the only
way to maintain liquidity is to have a steady supply of
fresh commodities. This is not too hard when talking about
orange juice, pork bellies or even gold. But they are not
making any more IPv4 addresses. The supply is fixed and
the problem which we face is that the global unallocated
supply is shrinking to the point of exhaustion in about two years.
In this situation, I can't see that it would be possible
to have a liquid IPv4 address market for more than a short
period of time. Since IPv4 trading is not regulated by
the SEC (unless it comes under some umbrella provision) the
way is open for some group of SMART, WELL-EDUCATED INDIVIDUALS
to rig the market and make off with lots of cash when it
collapses.
Everyone in the network operations sphere is a rank amateur
when it comes to making markets, maintaining liquidity and
regulation of trading. We cannot possibly hope to create
a market within the next two years which is beneficial to
the Internet network operations industry.
--Michael Dillon
John,
ARIN (and other RIRs) and the rules of use of IP address were specifically setup to allow global communications around the world with a large number of entities on an equal basis.
More IP addresses were allocated prior to the creation of the RIRs than since. The terms under which those early allocations were made is a bit fuzzy (to put it mildly). ARIN is attempting to remedy this fuzziness by creating a "legacy RSA" in which you give up some potential rights in exchange for some potential rights (it also asserts ARIN has the right to decide what happens with all the legacy space which causes some concern internationally, but that's not relevant here). See http://www.arin.net/registration/legacy/index.html for more information.
PS: The RIRs are community driven and so if the community wants to become a market place, they can petition ARIN have a vote and change if the majority of the community wants to.
The question really isn't whether the ARIN community will want a market to exist. A market, albeit black or grey, exists already. The question is how ARIN will deal with the market after the IPv4 free pool exhausts. Ignoring the market will likely result in the marginalization of ARIN for services such as registration of address space (for good or ill). Not ignoring the market will likely result in all sorts of 'fun', in the worst case similar to what has occurred in the domain name market.
"Choose wisely."
Regards,
-drc
Brandon,
Markets have a history of efficiently allocating resources, this much is true. My concern is when IP allocations are based on fiscal merit instead of technical merit. Also, don't forget speculators within a market. Do you really want the price of IP blocks bid up by "IP day traders"?
Presumably, the market would occur when the IPv4 address free pool has been exhausted. Without a market, there will be no IPv4 address space. With a market, IPv4 address space will be available at a price. That price will be constrained by the cost the IPv4-desirous ISP would face in deploying IPv6 + NAT-PT. If IPv6 + NAT-PT isn't sufficient, the IPv4-desirous ISP will face a choice of paying whatever the market will bear or doing without (implying double/triple NAT, etc.) since there won't be any other alternatives.
It's not clear to me how many people actually understand the implication of IPv4 free pool exhaustion...
Regards,
-drc
Michael,
We cannot possibly hope to create
a market within the next two years which is beneficial to
the Internet network operations industry.
A market will exist whether or not "we" want to create it and it doesn't matter how long lived it is. Without some form of regulation (a bit hard since it would need to be applied globally), it is almost certain it will be extremely painful and folks who "shouldn't" make lots of money will. So it goes.
Regards,
-drc
Yah. A market exists today, though it's perforce sub rosa.
An interesting operational question is how to prevent deaggregation as
a result of a market. If, say, a company isn't using half of its
address space, could it sell that half, to several other parties? Can
that be prevented by market means?
See http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/piara/index.html for a paper
I and some others wrote some years ago on these topics.
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
I wouldn't be so sure. How many millions of addresses do the Comcasts of this world use up every year? 2? 5? 8? (That is PER large ISP, NOT for all of them together.) When trying to obtain such a number of addresses immediately after the RIRs are out will almost certainly be possible, but at what price? The likes of HP will have to spend a lot of money auditing their networks or take huge risks freeing up millions of addresses. (How do you know there isn't some 15-year-old legacy system whose address is hardcoded all over the place (no DHCP back then! Even DNS wasn't ubiquitous in the early 1990s) in a given address block?) I'm not sure if they'll be prepared to do this for a price that the big ISPs will find affordable.
But even if this works out the first round, supply can only go down and the price can only go up the second round. If I were an ISP, I wouldn't start a process like this that can only end in tears a few years down the road, but rather, go for the alternatives where I don't have to obtain fresh IPv4 space immediately. It only makes sense to buy address space in bulk for large ISPs if they're caught by surprise and need time to implement kicking the IPv4 habit.
As for those of us who aren't ISPs connecting hundreds of thousands of customers per year: that single /8 a year that make up 90% of the requests can probably be accommodated from the normal return of address space, and if not, people who need a /24 can afford to pay a whole lot more than those who need a /10, so supply and demand should work fine here.
By the way, we already have a perfectly functioning IPv4 address market. But it's not about owning, but about renting. Buy IP transit service and you'll get a bunch of IP addresses thrown in.
Rod,
I used the term “clueless” in that message because of the number of times this concept has been discussed before primarily by business types who do not understand how the “Internet” works. In the large and small businesses that I have been in and with the ISPs and service providers (SP) I have worked for, addresses have usually been allocated sub-optimally. The free space is usually scattered across the allocation and the prefix for it is to small to announce. If this is a medium to large size company the ISP or interconnect provider would aggregate all of the routes for their own annoucements to tier 1 and 2 providers. IMHO ISPs and SPs could share space among their customers since they can then aggregate to an acceptable level to announce to the Internet but I do not see this as a “market”.
I not only embrace market mechanism, but with some of my colleagues on this list, was developing a bandwidth trading market while at EBS.
IMHO the amount of technical effort to extract these final v4 addresses is more work and cost then transitioning to v6. All major router and switch vendors have been v6 capable / ready for two years and most tier 1 carriers support v6 traffic today.
Regards,
John
As said by a network engineer, not someone who has obviously tried to deploy
the thing end to end. I've had a bit of experience playing with the emerging
v6 support in Squid and let me say this: handling v6 and gatewaying v6 are
wildly, wildly different problems.
To Network Operators: Your network may be ready. Thanks for that.
There's now at least 5, maybe 10 years of transition time for the edges
(content, consumer, enterprise) to catch up and make the transition.
As I ranted on #nanog last night; the v6 transition will happen when it
costs more to buy / maintain a v4 infrastructure (IP trading, quadruple NAT,
support overheads, v6 tunnel brokers, etc) then it is to migrate infrastructure
to v6.
If people were sane (!), they'd have a method right now for an enterprise
to migrate 100% native IPv6 and interconnect to the v4 network via translation
devices. None of this dual stack crap. It makes the heads of IT security and
technical managers spin.
But what do I know, I'm just an Arts student studying Linguistics atm..
Adrian
(ObRant: Want v6 to take off? Just give everyone who has a v4 allocation a
v6 allocation already. There's enough space to make that happen. Oh wait,
that reduces IRR revenues..)
I am not sure it’s a perfectly functioning market.
The whole point of a market is to penalize the holding excess inventory of IP addresses.
There is no penalty today because there is no opportunity cost to holding excess inventory.
What’s amazingly ironic is how the free market guys suddenly vanish when one wants to apply free markets to their industry …
Roderick S. Beck
Director of European Sales
Hibernia Atlantic
1, Passage du Chantier, 75012 Paris
http://www.hiberniaatlantic.com
Wireless: 1-212-444-8829.