[ppml] Free Market

On 25-aug-2007, at 18:34, Paul Vixie wrote:

>> Why not shift the burden now onto those who hold all those massive
>> allocations, and use ARIN to regulate the price of IP space.

Hm, so what if ARIN increases the price beyond cost, where does the  
profit go to?

> that's actually an unrelated topic.  nobody anywhere has the  
> authority to
> impose revocation terms or prices on pre-RIR allocations, and  
> that's where
> the majority of IPv4 space still is.

Depends on your definition... This is the status of the usable IPv4  
address space by /8:

+---------+----------+
| free    |       47 |
| afrinic |        2 |
| apnic   |       24 |
| arin    |       27 |
| iana    |       42 |
| lacnic  |        4 |
| ripencc |       26 |
| various |       49 |
+---------+----------+

"IANA" are the legacy /8s, which is only the third largest group,  
after the free space. However, if you include "various", which is the  
class B space and 193/8 and 198/8, then the legacy space adds up to  
91 /8s. If you group the RIRs together that's 83 /8s. If you look at  
the numbers of addresses allocated things look slightly different (in  
millions of addresses):

+---------+---------+
| free    |  16.777 |
| afrinic |   9.013 |
| apnic   | 352.349 |
| arin    | 380.182 |
| iana    | 687.866 |
| lacnic  |  51.817 |
| ripencc | 365.825 |
| various | 671.548 |
+---------+---------+

(Yes, apparently it's possible to assign address space to an end-user  
even though it's listed as "reserved" = free by IANA.)

Anyway, I don't buy all the "no authority" crap. If we can make  
people change their address and change their phone number if  
numbering plans change, there is precedence for touching legacy  
address space. Not that it matters much, because even if you reclaim  
EVERYTHING we'll still be out of IPv4 space before 2020 even ignoring  
growth in address use.