[address-policy-wg] 2015-01 Draft Document and Impact Analysis Published (Alignment of Transfer Requirements for IPv4 Allocations)

On Tue, 9 Jun 2015, Ciprian Nica wrote:

> When I've heared that UK's Department for Work and Pensions started to
> sell the IPs a couple weeks I couldn't believe it, although there were
> rumors about it some months ago. I remember that in 2012 they were asked
> about the /8 they keep for the internal network and they said it's in
> use and they can't give up on it.

Perhaps they could when they saw how much money they could get for it. If 
it cost 5M GBP (I just made that figure up) to move away from the address 
space and they can get more money selling it, then it makes sense to do 
so. If they were told to just hand it back without compensation, then this 
wouldn't happen, because they're not going to pay 5M GBP out of the 
goodness of their heart to give addresses away.

> Imagine if they would have returned the IPs to RIPE instead of taking 
> advantage and making a huge profit. If Daimler, UK's ministry of defence 
> and other holders of large blocks would give them back to the community, 
> that would be a real benefit.

Most likely most of these were actually using at least part of this space, 
and the only reason they handed it back was because they could pay X 
amount of money for doing the work, and get X+Y money back from selling.

Let's say an organization sits on a legacy /8. They might not use more 
than 30% of this actually, but it's really fragmented, so cleaning it up 
takes quite a lot of work. It's a lot of night time maintenance, changing 
server addresses, handling resulting problems etc. If they can get 15M EUR 
for this space over time, they can use some of that money to pay people do 
do the work needed to free it up. Yes, they're making a profit out of a 
resource that was handed to them back in the days for none or very little 
money, but they followed the rules back then. Now, they're sitting on this 
resource and is worth money if they can free it up. This fact creates a 
business case to do work and free it up and sell it. If you told them they 
need to hand it back without compensation, that business case goes away. 
So it's no option to try to squeeze blood from that stone for free.

Now, with the last-/8 policy, we're trying to subsidize and simplify for 
new entrants into the market and help them establish business. We changed 
the rules, because the resource was running out, but we're trying to ease 
the pain for the new/small guy. What we're now trying to do is make it a 
little less appealing to take this subsidized thing and sell it on the 
market, while not making it harder for the actual people we're trying to 
help.

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