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

Leo Vegoda wrote:
> On 29 Oct 2007, at 14:47, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>> The best solution is NO market and reclaiming address space that is 
>> unused.
>
> How much of the currently allocated IPv4 address space do you believe 
> is unused? How much do you think a reclaim programme would cost to run?
And we've tried appealing to people's better natures to return unused 
space. The result confirmed what most of us thought already: people 
mostly don't have better natures. So the next phase is to encourage them 
to return addresses into the pool (and remember, it doesn't matter 
whether they return via the RIRs or not, as long as they become usable) 
by allowing them to sell, buy or barter. IPv4 space has a limited life 
anyway. Once we hit 51% of traffic being IPv6 there will be a rapid 
flip-flop and IPv4 will be dead. A market in V4 addresses will at least 
allow network designers to put a real cost on not switching to IPv6 and 
may actually result in business cases being built. This will speed the 
adoption of IPv6. This is one of the aims of our proposal

Leo has already proved that a (fairly simple) reclamation job takes a 
lot of time and resource. This is for a /8 that no one much wanted and 
no one much used.

Nigel