[members-discuss] Sign-up fee for additional LIR account

Hi all,

After reading this thread, I wonder to know if the following kind of idea
has already been discussed. I apologize if so.

It’s pretty obvious that there will always be confronted interests among
LIRs if we put on the table the possibility that their membership fees
should be based on their ipv4 resource use (one simple idea: your
membership fee is <ripe_budget>/<total_ipv4_managed_by_ripe> *
<your_allocated_ipv4 >). Those with very large allocations would see this
as completely unfair as RIPE would be suddenly breaking in their business
cases by altering their costs schemes. I do think that this would help the
transition to IPv6 due to the financial pressure that big players would now
have and it could even be heavily increased by recurrently charging extra
amounts per allocated IPv4 address destined to a fund created to promote
IPv6 adoption by paying out subsidies for every IPv4 address space returned
to RIPE.

However, I don’t think this will ever work because, to begin with, most
probably it cannot be implemented without tons of legal issues.

So if we forget about that idea, we have a free market based on supply and
demand and a temporary way to get new IPv4 from RIPE: opening new LIR
accounts, which is quite controverted.

Whilst getting a /22 for every new LIR (not additional accounts) is IMHO a
good thing for newcomers, once the last /8 is gone they will have to pay
RIPE sign-up fees and then go to the market to get their… /24 maybe, and
who knows how high prices will be some years ahead. In the opposite
position, those who were storing IPv4 for years will be in the big business
as they will hold the last /n of really unused IPv4 space and that won’t be
transferred at the prices we are used today.

Do we really want this scenario? For years it’s been clear that we’ll
transition to IPv6 once there is really no other solution, we’ll keep
paying more and more for unused IPv4 space held by third parties until
there’s simply no more IPv4 left and then, during the real IPv6 transition,
those with less IPv4 reserves (a word we never wanted to hear in the
policies) will suffer much more than those who paid to have more reserves
before the real IPv4 depletion. In this model actual sole winners are those
who had and/or bought IPv4 now and didn’t really use it to a sold it later.
Pure speculation. Furthermore the model is also giving a competitive
advantage to all organizations holding unused IPv4 because old inefficient
assignment policies. That’s also unfair.

So my idea is, given these facts, why don’t let RIPE be the unique IPv4
market? If I recall correctly, we were told in the past that holding IPv4
space was not an ever-lasting right, space should be always in use and
comply with all policies at the moment, and we shouldn’t charge end-users
for the assignments made to them.

I’m not asking to propose those rules. Let’s say that currently allocated
IPv4 space is a right-to-use as long as you’re a LIR disregarding its
actual usage, and that membership fees will be kept in the same context (a
bigger member may pay triple the smaller as a maximum). However transfer
policies change to disallow transfers between members and set RIPE as the
sole entity allowed to transfer IPv4 space to/from members. It could even
work in a similar way to a stock market with a big difference: price is
static and set by RIPE, and the goal is to maintain the price as stable as
possible (ideally completely unchanged) until the full depletion of IPv4.

The idea behind is that, if RIPE impose a fixed price indefinitely both to
sell and buy, sellers won’t wait till the depletion is closer and buyers
will have a liquid market to buy from at a fixed price. This should
transfer unused space to LIRs willing to use it and the losers will
undoubtedly be speculators, which by the way no one wanted them in anything
related to IP space management.

New LIRs would have to pay both for the sign-up fees and the purchase of
their first allocation, thus discouraging the setup of unneeded new LIRs.
However RIPE might give some queue priorities to certain groups like (real)
newcomers or externally audited LIRs able to properly justify the urgency
for new space.

The biggest contingency I see in this model is an early illiquid market,
caused either because of many buyers wanting to buy all they can at lower
market prices than today, or sellers unwilling to sell, in both cases
because they really don’t believe in the model and they are hoping another
policy change in a near future. To circumvent the contingency, current last
/8 space could be reserved to newcomers (like it is today), and rest should
open positions the sooner the better to match upcoming sellers. I believe
that this model would redistribute currently unused IPv4 space to the
parties that really need them, and ultimately would show everybody how far
is IPv4’s end with much better accuracy. Add this to the fact that you’ll
get back the same amount of money from your IPv4 no matter when you
transition to IPv6, and then for many it might be worth starting the
transition today instead of tomorrow.

By the way, the price per IPv4 I had in mind while writing this was about
4€, one-time, but could be changed especially in the beginning by RIPE to
reach an ideal market liquidity. In the long run it shouldn’t be changed to
leverage all advantages brought by the fixed price.

I’m surely missing many things related, and this is why I wondered to know
if something like this has been already been discussed, as I would deem my
post as a vague draft of the idea :)

Kind regards,
David.


On Fri, Jul 22, 2016 at 9:09 AM, Gert Doering <gert at space.net> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Thu, Jul 21, 2016 at 10:46:26PM +0300, Host.AG wrote:
> > The money can be then used to force the adoption of ipv6.
>
> How so?  What can the RIPE NCC do, even with heaps of money, that they
> are not doing today?
>
> - free IPv6 training?  (done today)
> - outreach activity to tell people about IPv6?  (done today)
> - encourage IPv6 when registering IPv4 blocks?  (done today)
>
> if ISPs do not *want* to deploy IPv6, there is nothing the RIPE NCC can
> do - even if you add some requirements ("you must have an IPv6 block,
> it must be advertised, and your mail server must do IPv6!") people will
> fulfill that to the letter - and stop there.
>
> The pressure needs to come from the community and from the peers - talk
> to the content providers that have no IPv6 today.  If you're a content
> provider with IPv6, talk to the access providers that have no IPv6 today.
>
> If enough of you do that, possibly applying some mild pressure ("we're
> slowing down our IPv4 access because our CGN is overloaded, so if you
> want your content delivered over full speed, you need to use IPv6"),
> things will move.
>
> Asking the RIPE NCC to solve the problem for you is what we tried for
> the last 15 years, and while it got some results, this is not what needs
> to happen next.
>
> Gert Doering
>         -- NetMaster
> --
> have you enabled IPv6 on something today...?
>
> SpaceNet AG                        Vorstand: Sebastian v. Bomhard
> Joseph-Dollinger-Bogen 14          Aufsichtsratsvors.: A. Grundner-Culemann
> D-80807 Muenchen                   HRB: 136055 (AG Muenchen)
> Tel: +49 (0)89/32356-444           USt-IdNr.: DE813185279
>
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