[ppml] Policy Proposal: Expand timeframe of Additional Requests

[David Conrad]

Ted,

On Aug 16, 2007, at 2:52 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> The first hoarder to sell IP's will no doubt try what your saying -
> the next one will undercut, the thrid one will undercut more, and  
> so on.

This is, of course, assumes a market in IP addresses will behave like  
any other market.  However, there are some who do not believe this  
would apply to IP addresses and that speculators would engage in  
"Enron-like" behavior, driving the price of IPv4 addresses to ruinous  
heights. I suspect reality is somewhere in between and largely  
depends on the number of sellers.

> Keep in mind what the hoarders are doing is borderline criminal - they
> lied on the RSA to get the stock, if ARIN catches up with them ARIN
> could revoke the entire assignment.

As I mentioned, there are around 100 legacy /8s.  By definition,  
these addresses were not assigned under an RSA.  One may assert that  
those addresses implicitly fall under the RIR policy regime by  
tradition or some such, but I honestly can't imagine such assertions  
would go unchallenged.

> Another analogy is Freon, AKA Refrigerant 12.
> ...
> What happened is
> that within 3 years the price of Freon on the market crashed, and  
> today
> there's tons of it out there, even though it hasn't been  
> manufactured for
> years.

An interesting analogy.

> If IPv4 "sales" are allowed widely it will drive a stake in the  
> heart of
> IPv6 deployment and billions of dollars that the large networks  
> have already
> invested in getting ready for IPv6 will have been wasted.

An interesting assertion that might need a bit of explanation.  An  
alternative view is that the unpredictable (other than being higher)  
cost of obtaining IPv4 will encourage ISPs to migrate to IPv6 more  
quickly in order to regain some level of predictability in the costs  
of addressing.

Regards,
-drc