[ppml] alternative realities (was PIv6 for legacy holders (/w RSA + efficient use))

[David Conrad]

Paul,

On Jul 31, 2007, at 10:49 PM, Paul Vixie wrote:
> in <D03E4899F2FB3D4C8464E8C76B3B68B0C47F64 at E03MVC4- 
> UKBR.domain1.systemhost.net>
> (that's a message-id), michael dillon did a fine job of explaining  
> why a market
> might not form, in answer to david conrad's answer to my question  
> ("why will a
> market form").

Actually, he didn't.  He might have made an argument that the market  
won't be sustainable in the long term, but I've never disputed that  
-- hopefully, IPv4 will go away someday and as such, any market for  
that resource would collapse.

>> The question then becomes, why wouldn't a market form?
> because there are no goods or services.

You're kidding, right?

> ip addresses aren't property, and
> the right to use them isn't an asset once you divorce it from an ip  
> network
> that's using those addresses.

Asserting something repeatedly does not make it true.  I suspect if  
you ask, the vast majority of provider independent address holders  
would, in fact, consider their IPv4 addresses their property.   
Perhaps they are mistaken.  Perhaps you and ARIN's legal counsel  
are.  I'm sure we'll find out relatively soon.

> i didn't make that rule -- david conrad did,
> or at least, david conrad participated in writing down the rule  
> which had
> predated his work in founding APNIC.  see RFC 2052.

I suspect you mean RFC 2050 (and I was involved in writing it while I  
was at APNIC, not before).  You might look at the date of  
publication, read the IESG preamble, and ponder whether the  
circumstances in which that document were published are still  
applicable today.

> but the fact that MIT would be sued eighteen ways
> in the first week and nineteen on sunday if 18.0.0.0/8 showed up on  
> e-bay
> is like a great white elephant in the room, that most of you don't  
> want to
> talk about, except michael dillon, whom most of you seem to be  
> ignoring.

Hard to ignore something that has yet to be asserted.  I'm curious.   
Who would you see filing the lawsuit against MIT, Networld+Interop,  
Halliburton, etc. should they decide to lease out unused parts of  
their network address space?  ARIN?

> i can say that the fixed costs of the fraud that has to be  
> perpetrated in
> order to circumvent policy to transfer an ip address block, are  
> fairly high,
> and function as a transaction cost, which is to say a barrier to  
> transfer.

Sorry, what fraud has been perpetrated?

> as such, they do some good in protecting the routing table, since  
> blocks
> smaller than a /21 are probably not worth the fixed transaction  
> overhead of
> the fraud involved.

Ignoring whether or not it is fraud, I assure you, you are simply  
wrong here.

> removing those fixed costs, to transform what is now a
> black market into a normal "market", is not on my list of things to  
> wish for.

The fact that you might not wish for it or that you don't like it or  
that you think it not "Good for the Internet"(tm) does not mean it  
won't happen.  I need merely point to spam as an example you may have  
some familiarity with.

> we may have
> alternatives and we should investigate them.

OK, what are those alternatives?

Rgds,
-drc