Subject: RE: NATs as firewalls

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2007 09:55:36 -0000

> is a crisis to force action. That will occur sometime after 
> 2010 when they need more than they already have and find that 
> the lease price per IPv4 address per day has been moving up 
> from its current averages of $1/day or $5/day depending on 
> contract length (a price service providers seem to have no 
> trouble collecting while the addresses are still Free from 
> IANA). 

IP Addresses are not property and cannot be leased or sold.
The RIRs do not lease IP addresses, instead they provide
the service of registering IP addresses for a fee which is
directly related to the cost of the service. The number of
addresses provided is not directly a cost factor and the
scarcity of addresses certainly does not impact costs.

Also, even though there are only 3 years supply left in IANA,
to date none of the RIRs have changed their allocation policies
to deal with wind-down of IPv4 space or scarcity. Certainly
in some regions, there is the expectation that IPv6 will fill
the gap since it has been proven with consumer and enterprise
customers for the past year or two.

As the wind-down of the IPv4 address space gets more public
coverage, and more larcenous providers charge exorbitant fees
for free addresses, I expect to see a rising public demand 
for IPv6. Note that this implies that we have less than 2 years 
to get a solid IPv6 SOHO gateway requirements document out.

--Michael Dillon

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From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 07 Mar 2007 15:10:10 +0100

> IP Addresses are not property and cannot be leased or sold.

Can you show me real examples of an RIR repossessing address space?  If 
so, what is stopping them from reclaiming some of those /8s?

Eliot

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From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 07 Mar 2007 09:33:24 -0500

--On Wednesday, 07 March, 2007 09:55 +0000 [email-masked]
wrote:

>...
> for IPv6. Note that this implies that we have less than 2
> years  to get a solid IPv6 SOHO gateway requirements document
> out.

Regardless of what the dates are (I believe that specific
estimates in terms of years are interesting but ultimately silly
because 

	(i) there is every reason to expect a run on remaining
	addresses at some point, whether induced by "public
	coverage", "larcenous providers", ISP or RIR anxieties,
	or something else.  There are no good models for
	predicting timing of the onset of that stampede, nor its
	precise behavior, even if it is clear to many of us that
	it is inevitable in the IPv4 address space end-game if
	current trends and policies continue.
	
	(ii) it is reasonable to expect that by the time such a
	stampede gets serious (or somewhat before that), the
	RIRs and possibly ICANN will try to change policies to
	damp it.  Since no one has make public announcements
	about their contingency plans, or even asserted that
	they have them in place, it is not possible to predict
	how effective any such remedies will be in damping the
	stampede effects or even if the organizations involved
	will actually be able to do anything before it is too
	late.
	
	(iii) it is possible to imagine a number of scenarios
	that could start freeing up some of the space that is
	hidden in some legacy Class As (and even some legacy
	Class Bs).  Some of those would have a positive effect
	on address space availability, others would just
	encourage the stampede effect.  As Tony has pointed out,
	it is unlikely that they would make much difference to
	the actual rate of address exhaustion, but they could
	contribute to, or slightly damp, the tendency toward
	hysteria.  And there is no way to predict which one,
	much less how much.  

As I have also suggested earlier, a different way of figuring
out when we have run out of IPv4 space is not to look at when
the last address block is allocated but at when the perception
or claim of scarcity begins to justify bad behavior (in pricing,
protocol design, etc.).  By that criterion, we ran out several
years ago and can stop having that particular part of the
discussion.

But the bottom line, IMO, is that sooner or later, people will
perceive that it may be hard to get the address block after the
next one they ask for.  We can say that day grows closer with
each allocation and each month on Tony's chart (or Geoff's
chart, or any other plausible chart one likes), but we can't
predict when it will come.   When it does come -- when a lot of
people reach that conclusion -- it is reasonable to predict a
catastrophic change in allocation requests and presumably in
allocations.  Once that occurs, the projections based on models
of past behavior are trash and IPv4 space will be in very bad
trouble... probably in a matter of months and not years.

And that makes the "very little time... if one is going to get
started, the time is now, if not sooner" element of both
Michael's note and my recent one the important news for the
IETF.  Or we can leave it to the marketplace (including the
larcenous providers and even more larcenous address-hoarders) to
sort things out for us.

     john

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From: "Tony Hain" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 7 Mar 2007 11:19:38 -0800

> > IP Addresses are not property and cannot be leased or sold.

You have clearly not been following the efforts in APnic or RIPE to enable
the inevitable trading regime. Despite what policy says people will treat
their allocations as property.

> so, what is stopping them from reclaiming some of those /8s?

The legal costs... While ARIN would have one hell of a court battle trying
to reclaim 18/8, the MIT Office of the President would have no trouble
recognizing they were sitting on a pile of endowed chairs, and would shoot
the entire network staff if necessary to put that block on the market. 

Tony