[ppml] IPv4 "Up For Grabs" proposal

[James Hess]

> incentives. The most ARIN does is to try and make sure that ARIN itself
> is not a barrier to IPv6 adoption because ARIN realizes that IPv6 is the
> only way to resolve the problem of IPv4 address exhaustion.

IPv6 creates other problems (i.e. it incurs costs due to the large size of the
addresses it uses). It is not necessarily the only way to resolve the problem
of IPv4 exhaustion, and it's not a RIR's place to try to deprecate the IPv4,
the RIRs are the stewards of the address space and continue to do their
job, otherwise, a new RIR could be formed to fill in the void.

Unless at a point there truly are too few IPv4 users to care.

Most connected hosts do not need to accept inbound connections, and
an alternative would be say for ISPs to NAT and PAT everything.

The NAT-capable technology is cheaper and possibly already well in place.
The same cannot be said of IPv6, it is in fact possible that it will be
preferred.

In that case, ISPs ultimately reclaim public addresses not used for servers,
make customers pay dearly for each public IP, and resolve the problem of IPv4
exhaustion by reducing the number of public IP addresses that are justifiable
for any user of address space, to a small number of hosts that are used for
operating well-known services to the public.

And they actually gain an advantage by doing so -- the scarcity of
IPv4 addresses
and the difficulty of obtaining address space creates a barrier to
entry for new
hosting providers to ever form.  This means (when using IPv4), older ISPs/
hosting providers with more ip addresses get a competitive advantage out of the
mess.

At that point, why would they ever give up the advantage, and replace
a perfectly
good NAT solution by adoptiong IPv6 as a preferred technology?


In many ways, IPv6 is the superior, cleaner,  "more correct" technology.
But superior, "more correct" technologies do not always win the marketplace,
particularly not when they are more expensive, and a simpler solution to the
problem that would cause the change is already available without taking on the
risk of switching to a brand new protocol.

--
-J