Subject: Re: Charging I-Ds

From: Douglas Otis <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2007 10:26:07 -0700

On Jul 31, 2007, at 5:16 PM, Peter Sherbin wrote:

>> The current business model does not bring in enough cash. How do  
>> we bring in more in a way that furthers ietf goals?
>
> E.g. other standards setting bodies have paid memberships and/or  
> sellable standards.
>
> IETF unique way could be to charge a fee for an address allocation  
> to RIRs. On their side RIRs would charge for assignments as they do  
> now and return a fair share back to IANA/IETF.

A IP address use fee might help solve two problems.  When based upon  
relative scarcities, IPv4 space should demand a higher premium.   
Even .5 cents per IPv4 address could generate perhaps 10 million per  
year.  This fee might help free up some unused IP address space,  
where some of these funds could be allocated to the various  
"Internet" supporting services.  Meeting fees could then reflect just  
the cost of the meeting itself.  This might be analogous to licensing  
radio frequencies.

> If IETF start charging for reading contributors' papers how much  
> voluntary contribution such arrangement would generate?

Charging to publish would interfere with information tracking.  One  
of the attractive features of the IETF has been a free information  
exchange where a document's status is directly declared.  Charge a  
fee may devolve into searching various independent websites where  
documents would have an unknown status with respect to the IETF.   
Much of the authority conveyed is in the assigning of status.

> Is there a guarantee that a pre-paid content remains worth reading?

This sounds like a question an ad agency might ask.  Would pre-paid  
content permit uploading videos? : )

-Doug

_______________________________________________
Ietf mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf

---

From: "Richard Shockey" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2007 14:58:39 -0400

In keeping with Eric Rosen's excellent thread ..

The simple solution is to charge 500 .. UK POUNDS!! for Internet Access
during the IETF meetings. This is clearly in keeping with standard
hotel/airport practices around the world.

This would clearly solve the budget problem as well as discourage people
attending WG meetings from spending most of their time on YouTube instead of
following the discussion.

###########

> now and return a fair share back to IANA/IETF.

A IP address use fee might help solve two problems

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 01 Aug 2007 16:48:19 -0400

> hotel/airport practices around the world.
GBP 500 for using a laptop in a WG meeting for purposes not related to
the WG meeting.

GBP 1000 for making comments in a WG meeting on a draft you haven't read.

Charge for every PowerPoint slide used in a presentation - GBP 2 for the
first one, and the rate doubles for each additional slide.

---

From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2007 23:12:15 +0200

> first one, and the rate doubles for each additional slide.

Right, the letters on the average powerpoint slide are way too  
comfortable to read from the back of the room the way things are now.

---

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 1 Aug 2007 23:54:53 +0100

> > IETF unique way could be to charge a fee for an address 
> allocation to 
> > RIRs. On their side RIRs would charge for assignments as 
> they do now 
> > and return a fair share back to IANA/IETF.
> 

The Board of Trustees of ARIN, one of the 5 RIRs, has just released an
official statement here:
http://www.arin.net/announcements/20070701.html

   There are, however, those who propose that the democratically
   established governance principles now be abandoned, to create
   a market in IP addresses.  A market that abandons these 
   existing, consensus-driven core values would encourage 
   speculators to take advantage of the upcoming time of 
   relative scarcity of IPv4 addresses to profit from less 
   foresightful users' remaining need.

   The purpose of this memorandum is to assure the community 
   that the democratic principles of Internet governance will be 
   adhered to by ARIN,

That adds to the other two big hurdles. First, IP addresses are not
property. And second, given the fact that there is a rapidly shrinking
pool of free addresses to be sold, there is not sufficient liquidity for
a stable market to form.

--Michael Dillon

---

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2007 15:46:51 -0700

Are we certain that an IP address is not property? We can state that it is not the case but such statements do not necessarily have the intended effect.

The only way to be sure would be to do something silly and see what the result of the lawsuit is. For example we could decide to cancel the allocation for net 18. Jeff Schiller would have the injunction delivered a few hours later and after eight to twelve years of littigation we would have an answer. In the meantime net 18 could be considered property for all practical purposes since regardless of the outcome we do not anticipate that an IPv4 address will have a significant scarcity premium in 2015.

I do not think that the conditions are met for an efficient market in IPv4 address space. There is not sufficient liquidity for a start and the constraints on supply are distinctly odd. All it takes to assign IPv4 address assignments is for someone to publish the BGP adverts and for others to accept them. 

Returning to the previous thought experiment, if the assignment body that originally allocated net 18 attempts to withdraw it then its time for lawyers at 20 paces. If on the other hand the net community decides to recognize another source of authority and direct net 18 traffic elsewhere I don't see where the cause of action lands.

There are certainly cases where this type of issue could occur. If the assignment bodies decided to price gouge for address block allocations to buy themselves a personal yatch for example. 

What we have to avoid losing sight of here is that the objective is to deploy IPv6, an environment where technical scarcity of addresses is simply not an issue. The only scarcity that can exist is if we are negligent in the allocation procedures.

As I said at the plenary, don't worry too much about the state we leave the IPv4 world. The IPv4 world will go away when people stop exchanging IPv4 routes. I don't expect that to happen until 2025-2030, but that is the objective here. I don't expect people to ever stop routing IPv4 packets on private nets. There are still people who route UUCP.

We need to think in terms of how we establish strategic interests that

 1) Encourage transition to the prefered end state (pure IPv6)
 2) Minimize inconvenience to and maximize functionality for all parties during transition
 3) Minimize the cost to all parties
 4) Align costs of transition with benefits

During the later stages of transition we will be in a state where there are vastly more Internet hosts than IPv4 addresses. At least a hundred billion hosts, quite likely a trillion or more.

Many of those hosts will not require IPv4 connectivity. Light switches for example. But most hosts will need a limited IPv4 connection capability. That is where hyper-NAT will come in. What the devices require is some quantity of IPv4 ports, not an IPv4 address.

By 2015 the IPv4 address space is going to be heavily NAT-ed. The only way that 5 billion people can use 4 billion addresses is if a substantial number of people share. There will thus be the following classes of broadband internet user:

A) Has at least one full IPv4 address plus an IPv6 /64.
B) Has a share in a NAT-ed IPv4 addesss plus an IPv6 /64.
C) Has at least one full IPv4 address
D) Has a share in a NAT-ed IPv4 address

Note that the total number of users in class A and C combined cannot ever be more than four billion and in practice is highly unlikely to exceed two billion. We have got as far as we have to date because dial-up users are in effect time-sharing their IPv4 address allocation. The 'always on' property of broadband means that this form of sharing will inevitably decline.

My big concern here is that the rejectionism I see with respect to NAT in the IPv6 community is driving the market from state C into state D, the worst possible state. We have to engineer a situation where the market forces encourage a transition to state B. It is not possible for every Internet user to end up in state A unless the growth of Internet use suddenly stops.

I expect the market in IPv4 addresses to trace the following pattern

Phase 1: Anticipation
	As the exhaustion in IPv4 address space nears there will be increasing speculative acquisition of IPv4 address allocations. Within a few years a point will be reached where the anticipated resale value of an IPv4 address exceeds the cost of holding it as inventory. At this point the entire remaining stock of IPv4 will be purchased by IP address squatters.

Phase 2: Confusion
	The immeditate reaction to exhaustion of the address space will be recriminations countered by 'I told you so'. Parties with excess IPv4 capacity will investigate options for sale.

Phase 3: Speculation
	Despite the large number of IPv4 addresses the technical difficulty of transfer creates liquidity issues. As with certain commodity markets (e.g. Palladium during the cold fusion bubble) the price rises to a point where the industrial users are effectively excluded. Once the realitiy checks are taken out of the equation the stage is set for serious price acceleration.

Phase 4: Asset Stripping
	Large ISPs begin to exceed their existing IPv4 stock. They discover that it is cheaper to buy a smaller ISP for its stock of excess IPv4 address space than to buy from an IPv4 speculator. Others buy ISPs with large IPv4 allocations, stick the existing customer behind a hyper-NAT and a /24 and sell the /16 to the address speculators.

Phase 5: Bubble bursts
	The speculators discover that ultimately the price of IPv4 addresses is going to be set by the cost of putting a network segment behind a hyper-NAT. The bubble bursts and a huge inventory of IPv4 space is thrown onto the market. At this point all ISP support infrastructure supports hyper-NAT by default.

It is in the strategic interests of ISPs to deploy not just any hyper-NAT but a hyperNAT that drives to deployment of IPv6 and minimize the length of the crisis phase. If they acted soon enough it might even be possible to avoid the buble phase entirely.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] 
> Sent: Wednesday, August 01, 2007 6:55 PM
> To: [email-masked]
> Subject: RE: Charging I-Ds
> 
> The Board of Trustees of ARIN, one of the 5 RIRs, has just 
> released an official statement here:
> That adds to the other two big hurdles. First, IP addresses 
> are not property. And second, given the fact that there is a 
> rapidly shrinking pool of free addresses to be sold, there is 
> not sufficient liquidity for a stable market to form.
> 
> --Michael Dillon
>

---

From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2007 01:27:52 +0200

> I expect the market in IPv4 addresses to trace the following pattern

If you would have cared to quote properly and thus read the previous  
message you'd have seen that ARIN doesn't want to allow an address  
market. Since they are the ones administering 1.5 billion of the 2.5  
billion addresses given out, including the legacy class A space, not  
much is going to happen without their cooperation. (But note that the  
US is at about 35% of the addresses it used up last year right now,  
while China is at 110%. This will be the first year that China and  
not the US is the largest user of address space.)

For the purpose of the rest of the discussion, please realize that  
around 90% of the requests is satisfied with 10% of the address space  
used per year and the other way around. I.e., 90% of all address  
space is going to a fairly small number of large ISPs.

> Phase 1: Anticipation
> 	As the exhaustion in IPv4 address space nears there will be  
> increasing speculative acquisition of IPv4 address allocations.

The only people who can successfully request enough address space to  
make a difference are the people who have been doing large requests  
before. So the address space is going to end up with the large ISPs  
regardless whether they play nice or try to get as much as possible  
before supplies run out.

> Phase 2: Confusion
> 	The immeditate reaction to exhaustion of the address space will be  
> recriminations countered by 'I told you so'. Parties with excess  
> IPv4 capacity will investigate options for sale.

It will be interesting to see what ARIN does if (for instance) HP  
tries to sell 30 million addresses. I don't think ARIN can let that  
happen and I don't think that HP has a good case in court if ARIN  
subsequently takes the addresses. (If they were going to sell them  
obviously they didn't need them.)

What are the precedents here with phone number and address renumbering?

> Phase 3: Speculation

You forget that the only people who'll have trouble are those that  
need NEW address space. That's a relatively small percentage of the  
internet community at any given time. And 90% of them can be served  
from address space that is returned every year. (This can be 10+  
million addresses per year.)

> Phase 4: Asset Stripping
> 	Large ISPs begin to exceed their existing IPv4 stock. They  
> discover that it is cheaper to buy a smaller ISP for its stock of  
> excess IPv4 address space than to buy from an IPv4 speculator.

Only if you need relatively few addresses.

> Phase 5: Bubble bursts

Second round of I-told-you-sos as we welcome large numbers of people  
on IPv6. Sweet!

> It is in the strategic interests of ISPs to deploy not just any  
> hyper-NAT but a hyperNAT that drives to deployment of IPv6 and  
> minimize the length of the crisis phase. If they acted soon enough  
> it might even be possible to avoid the buble phase entirely.

NAT isn't the only answer to the question "I can't get IPv4  
addresses, what do I do?" Using IPv6 and a proxy to reach the IPv4  
world is much, much cleaner. And it also works from v4 to v6. We  
really should start advocating this as the preferred transition  
mechanism.

---

From: Douglas Otis <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2007 18:23:08 -0700

> really should start advocating this as the preferred transition  

It seems you both are in agreement.  Wouldn't a proxy for reaching  
IPv4 represent Philip's State B?

>> D) Has a share in a NAT-ed IPv4 address

Such a topology must offer a means to declare the transitions between  
IPv6 and IPv4.  Perhaps the HIP WG may offer a popular method to  
navigate within the growing complexity.  Could SSH, LDAP, and a  
dynamic DNS server within a commodity residential access point  
represent a solution as well?  This might introduce an era where  
rapid routing changes becomes the norm, and where most network  
connection are expected to use TLS or SSH tunneling.  These highly  
extensible protocols are within the capability of today's  
microprocessors in commodity products.

-Doug

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 02 Aug 2007 23:42:03 -0400

> NAT isn't the only answer to the question "I can't get IPv4 addresses,
> what do I do?" Using IPv6 and a proxy to reach the IPv4 world is much,
> much cleaner. And it also works from v4 to v6. We really should start
> advocating this as the preferred transition mechanism. 
NAT and proxies are not mutually exclusive.  There are advantages to
having a proxy that can forward TCP and UDP traffic from an outside
address/port to an inside address/port and vice versa; there are also
advantages to a NAT that can do the same thing on a per-packet level. 
But a good, explicit protocol and API for doing each would be welcome. 
It would also be useful if the forwarder/NAT had explicit means of
communicating the "external" source and destination address/port to the
"internal" host - say via the same control protocol used to establish
and maintain the address binding.  That would make it relatively easy
to, say, have a server inside an IPv6-only network establish presence on
an IPv4 network provided by an ISP, while still allowing the application
to see the real IPv4 source address (say for logging or spam filtering).

The main thing is to avoid having "transparent NAT" - i.e. NATs that
automatically establish address bindings and start forwarding packets -
in IPv6.  A lot of where NAT bites is when it tries to second-guess what
the application is doing.  (that goes double for DNS ALG).  I'm not
nearly so worried about IPv4-to-IPv6 NATs when the applications are
explicitly aware of the NAT and explicitly manage the binding, and where
the NAT doesn't try to muck with DNS.

Keith

---

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2007 01:17:30 -0700

> From: Iljitsch van Beijnum [mailto:[email-masked]] 

> If you would have cared to quote properly and thus read the 
> previous message you'd have seen that ARIN doesn't want to 
> allow an address market. 

ARIN does not want an address market? So what? I'd like someone to give me a free Porche. Does not mean its going to happen.

> Since they are the ones 
> administering 1.5 billion of the 2.5 billion addresses given 
> out, including the legacy class A space, not much is going to 
> happen without their cooperation. 

Define 'administering'. Does ARIN have the effective legal or technical capability to revoke an address block allocation within a relevant timescale? Does ARIN have the capability to police the market and detect attempts to sell space? Methinks not.

> It will be interesting to see what ARIN does if (for 
> instance) HP tries to sell 30 million addresses. I don't 
> think ARIN can let that happen and I don't think that HP has 
> a good case in court if ARIN subsequently takes the 
> addresses. (If they were going to sell them obviously they 
> didn't need them.)

HP forms a series of holding companies, vests the IP space with the holding companies, sells the holding companies. 

HP was allocated much of their space before there was an ARIN. 

The only effect that threats from ARIN would have in this situation is to make the situation worse. HP uses the address space internally. Transition to a different address space where they are behind a NAT has real costs for them. They are only going to make the transition if they can recover those costs.

Preventing the resale of address space might well entail an anti-trust violation. ARIN is effectively preventing HP from competing with ARIN in the sale of IP address blocks. Each of their class A addresses would cost several million dollars from ARIN. 

> You forget that the only people who'll have trouble are those 
> that need NEW address space. That's a relatively small 
> percentage of the internet community at any given time. And 
> 90% of them can be served from address space that is returned 
> every year. (This can be 10+ million addresses per year.)

You forget that the whale is not really a fish, it's an insect and it lives on bananas. 

Do not use the phrase 'you appear to forget' to introduce dubious claims of fact. It suggests that people disagree with you out of ignorance rather than not accepting the claim you make. In this case the claim you make is at best irrelevant.

If this were so there would not be a significant net consumption of address space. This is clearly not the case or there would be no issue and no need for IPv6 at all.

---

From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2007 11:20:23 +0200

On 3-aug-2007, at 10:17, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:

> ARIN does not want an address market? So what? I'd like someone to  
> give me a free Porche. Does not mean its going to happen.

So the fact that you're not getting a free car means that we're going  
to have an IP address market?

> Define 'administering'. Does ARIN have the effective legal or  
> technical capability to revoke an address block allocation within a  
> relevant timescale? Does ARIN have the capability to police the  
> market and detect attempts to sell space? Methinks not.

They do to some degree. Whether that's going to be enough is unknown  
at this time. I do know that if ARIN says it shouldn't happen, and  
people try to make it happen anyway, ARIN has a problem and they'll  
have to do something about it. Also, in the end it's all about what  
routing information people accept from others. If ARIN can get a  
reasonable subset of all network operators to reject certain prefixes  
from certain people, the prefixes are useless to those people and the  
act of selling is moot.

> HP was allocated much of their space before there was an ARIN.

So? The only problem is that the people who got this space didn't  
have to sign any documents to get it, which makes it harder to do  
things like collect fees. It doesn't automatically mean the address  
space is for them to own until the end of time.

> The only effect that threats from ARIN would have in this situation  
> is to make the situation worse. HP uses the address space  
> internally. Transition to a different address space where they are  
> behind a NAT has real costs for them. They are only going to make  
> the transition if they can recover those costs.

But if they're selling, obviously they don't need the space so this  
becomes a very weak argument. However, this is a reasonable argument  
against ARIN just reclaiming the address space over night. (All the  
more reason that IF reclamation is going to happen, that it start  
happening soon.)

> Preventing the resale of address space might well entail an anti- 
> trust violation.

LOL. Since when do we have competition in this area?

>> percentage of the internet community at any given time.

> Do not use the phrase 'you appear to forget' to introduce dubious  
> claims of fact.

I could accuse you of being ignorant or stupid instead, but that  
would be impolite.

> It suggests that people disagree with you out of ignorance rather  
> than not accepting the claim you make. In this case the claim you  
> make is at best irrelevant.

Hardly. If you're out of oil, cars stop in the street. If you're out  
of IP addresses, the internet will be able to do everything it did  
the day before except accept new users/systems. That's a pretty big  
difference.

---

From: <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2007 11:34:11 +0100

> The only effect that threats from ARIN would have in this 
> situation is to make the situation worse. HP uses the address 
> space internally. Transition to a different address space 
> where they are behind a NAT has real costs for them. They are 
> only going to make the transition if they can recover those costs.

HP has nothing to worry about threats from ARIN. It is the threat of
lawsuits from large ISPs who have been working within the ARIN rules,
that HP should worry about. If the situation arises that ARIN cannot
supply a large ISP with the addresses that it needs, and that large ISP
suspects that HP has more addresses than they can justfy under ARIN's
policy, the the large ISP will sue HP. 

HP is in a very risky postion here if they cannot meet ARIN's
requirements for justifying their address allocation. The wise move for
HP is to audit their addresses, bring themselves into compliance with
ARIN's policies, return the surplus addresses to ARIN and sign a
Registration Services Agreement (RSA).

I suspect that the main reason why HP is in this position is that the
people who manage IPv4 addresses within HP have been flying below the
radar of senior management. In HP and many other companies around the
world, IP addressing is about to come to the attention of senior
management for the first time. I would not bet that senior management
views these issues in quite the same way as their network engineers do.

--Michael Dillon

---

From: Arnt Gulbrandsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2007 14:41:11 +0200

This thread recurs about once for every second or third A that's 
allocated, so after 15-25 more iterations we're done.

Arnt

---

From: Julien Laganier <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2007 16:16:25 +0200

On Friday 03 August 2007, Keith Moore wrote:
> > NAT isn't the only answer to the question "I can't
> > get IPv4 addresses, what do I do?" Using IPv6 and
> > a proxy to reach the IPv4 world is much, much
> > cleaner. And it also works from v4 to v6. We
> > really should start advocating this as the
> > preferred transition mechanism.
>
> NAT and proxies are not mutually exclusive.  There
> are advantages to having a proxy that can forward
> TCP and UDP traffic from an outside address/port to
> an inside address/port and vice versa; there are
> also advantages to a NAT that can do the same thing
> on a per-packet level. But a good, explicit protocol
> and API for doing each would be welcome. It would
> also be useful if the forwarder/NAT had explicit
> means of communicating the "external" source and
> destination address/port to the "internal" host -
> say via the same control protocol used to establish
> and maintain the address binding. 

FWIW, there's a protocol that would give you the same 
functionality as a NAT while preserving end-to-end 
transparency of the network (i.e. IPv4 packets won't 
be modified between the internal host on the IPv6-only 
network and its IPv4 correspondent outside in the IPv4 
Internet). It would also let the internal host to know 
what address/port pair it was using to communicate, 
without change to the application.

That's Ream-Specific IP [RFC3102][RFC3103].

> That would make it relatively easy
> to, say, have a server inside an IPv6-only network
> establish presence on an IPv4 network provided by an
> ISP, while still allowing the application to see the
> real IPv4 source address (say for logging or spam
> filtering).

Yes, that was pretty easy on an RSIP-enabled server on 
an IPv6-only network connected to the IPv4 world via 
an RSIP gateway, e.g. /etc/init.d/inetd start on the 
server!

Last but not least, provided that an IKE implementation 
would be modified to work hand-in-hand [RC3104] with 
RSIP, it would also be possible to support end-to-end 
IPv4 IPsec while one or both ends are on an IPv6 only 
network.

--julien

[RFC3102] Realm Specific IP: Framework
[RFC3103] Realm Specific IP: Protocol Specification
[RFC3104] RSIP Support for End-to-end IPsec

---

From: Eric Burger <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 06 Aug 2007 09:21:21 -0500

I like Reaming much more the Realms.  Much more in the spirit of NAT :-)

> [RFC3104] RSIP Support for End-to-end IPsec

Notice:  This email message, together with any attachments, may contain information  of  BEA Systems,  Inc.,  its subsidiaries  and  affiliated entities,  that may be confidential,  proprietary,  copyrighted  and/or legally privileged, and is intended solely for the use of the individual or entity named in this message. If you are not the intended recipient, and have received this message in error, please immediately return this by email and then delete it.