[arin-discuss] Food for thought: IPv4 accountability.

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

Ultimately it boils down to the following:

Current customers of ISP's all have an IPv4 address assigned.

There will come a point for ALL ISP's whether they are /8 holders
or small ones, where they won't have any more IPv4 than what they
already have handed out to existing customers.  There won't be
any more IPv4, either from begging ARIN or buying it from someone else, 
no matter how much you are willing to pay.

At that point, NEW customers of those ISP's will be told that
they either have to do IPv6 or nothing.

For a period of time, those new customers will probably go to other
ISPs that still have IPv4.

But eventually, ALL ISP's will be out of IPv4 and those new customers
will have to take IPv6 or nothing.

So, if your a growing ISP and you have lots of unused IPv4 you will
be able to grow for a longer time than a competitor who has a little 
amount of unused IPv4.  You benefit and your competitor who has a small 
amount of IPv4 unused will lose out - BUT they will ONLY lose out on GROWTH.

In other words, if your a small ISP and YOUR MAKING MONEY then the
IPv4 runout merely means that while your out-of-IPv4, your competitors 
will simply make more and more money than you.  It doesn't mean that you 
will start LOSING money.  You will make the same money you have always 
made.  If your feeding yourself and your family, then you will continue 
to do so.

Eventually, when there's no more ISP's that have IPv4 to give out, then 
customers will be forced to take IPv6 - and you will be able to pick up 
growing from where you left off.

I think the problem here is that so many people in the ISP business are 
assuming that growth is only going to happen by stealing customers. 
Meaning, that if my competitors are growing, it's because they are 
taking customers away from me, and I'm getting smaller.

I humbly submit here that IPv4 depletion isn't going to work this way. 
Just because you can't give IPv4 to new customers, because you have run 
out, doesn't mean that your going to lose any existing ones.  And if you 
do lose an existing customer then you will be back in the game and have 
IPv4 to hand out that your existing customer was using.

Thus, I don't buy the fairness arguments I see here.  ISPs need to 
concentrate on making their existing customers happy with their service 
- that's how you keep from losing customers.  And ISP's need to take the 
long view and realize that the period of time after they have run out of 
IPv4 and while all their other competitors are still giving out IPv4 is 
going to be a lot shorter than they think.

Some of these small ISP's complaining are are like a small restaurant 
owner located in town who has an established clientele that likes his 
food and is keeping him going, who wants to throw all that away so that 
he can grow to the size of a Burger King or McDonalds, and have a 
clientele who hates eating his food, and only goes there because they 
are forced to by their kids who are demanding Happy Meals.

So, as an ISP owner you would rather have customers who hate you but are 
with you because your the only game in town with IPv4?  May I ask why 
your even in the ISP business in the first place?  Do you even LIKE the 
Internet?  Or is it nothing more than a convenient mechanism to make 
money for you, and you would be just as happy selling life insurance 
policies or something?

Think about it.

Ted

Breault Jonathan wrote:
> Basically, I think the problem is that once you hold a resource from arin,
> you only need to justify when you request new resources... I think there is
> missing a policy that would allow ARIN to ask every 3-5 years for
> justification on the resources' usage and take action on the blocks that
> have a too small Usage Ratio.
> 
> The question we all need to ask is, do we really want to produce
> justification on regular basis?
> 
> What should we do with weak isp's?
> 
> Going after the big historical allocation might be a way to release some ip
> blocks. But it can also affect people with smaller blocks ... Maybe we
> should give an incentive to holders of /20 that use 2 C classes on it so
> they just move to a /22 ...
> 
> Maybe somebody on the list has ideas on how something like that can be
> achieved without being unfair for others...
> 
> 
> jonathan
> 
> Le 22/07/09 12:10 PM, « John Curran » <jcurran at arin.net> a écrit :
> 
>> On Jul 22, 2009, at 11:36 AM, Plimpton Ben wrote:
>>
>>> John
>>>
>>> If this were the case, once a smaller ISP had met your routing
>>> criteria, shouldn't we all then be able to request IP's based on
>>> what our needs will be for the next few months and not have to
>>> justify our previous allocations.
>> Ben - ARIN doesn't have routing criteria.  ARIN does have policies set
>> by the community which require an ISP to be able to justify a minimum
>> size block before being able to come directly to ARIN for an allocation.
>> Once you meet that minimum address requirement, you can come to
>> ARIN.
>>
>>> I'm guessing that at some point, organizations with large
>>> allocations have made requests for additional space without having
>>> to justify the usage on their other blocks or else this wouldn't be
>>> an issue b/c they would have filled them up already and the rest of
>>> the community wouldn't feel that they're squatting on their previous
>>> allocations.
>> Everytime you come for an additional allocation, you have to show
>> utilization of your existing address blocks.  This applies to equally to
>> all requesters.
>>
>> The concern expressed is that there are some folks who hold large
>> historically allocations of address space which do not come in at all
>> for additional allocations, and hence never have to show their usage.
>>
>> /John
>>
>> John Curran
>> President and CEO
>> ARIN
>>
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