[address-policy-wg] 2007-08 New Policy Proposal (Enabling Methods for Reallocation of IPv4 Resources)

On 5 nov 2007, at 18:27, Geoff Huston wrote:

>> Saying there will be a market is harmful regardless of whether it's  
>> true, because that way, people will be disinclined to give back the  
>> address space they currently hold but don't use. So if there's  
>> going to be one, let it be a surprise.

> You are talking about giving an industry that is valued in the  
> trillions of dollars a "surprise"?

To avoid a harmful self-fulfilling prophecy: absolutely. Everyone  
knows IPv4 addresses are running out. Trying to outsmart ourselves  
coming up with clever things to do after that happens is at best a  
waste of time.

I'm not impressed with your trillions, by the way. (Not even sure how  
many zeroes that has in English.) The telcos see so much money flow  
through their hands because they hold the cables/frequencies needed by  
people to communicate, and because they know how to bill people. Being  
able to route packets or timeslots is only an afterthought in those  
processes and the telcos aren't exactly good at doing that. (Typing  
this on my unconnected laptop three weeks after signing up for DSL  
service and not even gotten a contract or a vague promise of a  
delivery date.)

> I'm sorry but thats just not an option here - we simply need to make  
> this process of extending the useable life of IPv4 work as best we  
> can beyond the exhaustion point of the unallocated address pool.

What we should be doing is minimizing the pain - not making it last as  
long as possible. Every day, every hour, every minute that someone has  
to spend doing work to get address space or wait for address space  
hurts our industry. We still have a billion plus addresses to burn  
though, and we should do exactly that using the current policies.  
Those aren't great, but they are the devil we know.

Any action we take regarding the situation after that isn't going to  
magically create a few hundred million new IPv4 addresses every year,  
so it's going to be suboptimal in some way or another, no matter what  
we do. Personally, I'm never going to sign off on a situation where on  
the one hand, we say that it's too hard to reclaim legacy space, but  
on the other hand, it's ok that the holders of that space get to make  
money from it. But I expect this issue to be largely moot because the  
large ISPs ( ~= telcos) that are responsible for 90% of the yearly  
IPv4 address consumption are too cheap to buy IP addresses for a price  
that makes it worth HP et al their time to renumber anyway.

> We need to do it in the open, we need to do it with the assistance  
> and cooperation of many others, we need to do it so that the network  
> can continue to operate as best as it can, and we need to do our bit  
> to get the industry get itself out of this rather professionally  
> constructed hole!

If only at some point in the 1990s a group of engineers had been  
tasked with coming up with a technology to keep IP going after the 32- 
bit IPv4 address space has been depleted...