[ppml] Proposed Policy: IPv4 Countdown

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: ppml-bounces at arin.net [mailto:ppml-bounces at arin.net]On Behalf Of
>David Conrad
>Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2007 3:56 PM
>To: alh-ietf at tndh.net
>Cc: Public Policy Mailing List
>Subject: Re: [ppml] Proposed Policy: IPv4 Countdown
>
>
>
>I suspect ISPs, when faced with the prospect of getting not  
>insignificant revenue from the address space they already 'have under  
>their control', will quickly see the advantages of renumbering their  
>infrastructure with IPv6, tunneling IPv4 through IPv6, or (possibly  
>augmented) RFC 1918 space and using their existing non-private IPv4  
>for customer NAT box interconnects.
>

More likely they will create 2 tiers of pricing for customers.  One tier
will be RFC1918 - you get as much of that as you want for free, but your
"public" IP number will belong to the ISP.  That means no VPN's no servers,
no kazza, no gnutella, no bittorent, nothing of that stuff.  The other
tier will be costly - you can get a public IP address, dynamically
assigned of course - but it will be more expensive.

>
>I'm not sure I follow this.  Services would lose eyeballs if they  
>were IPv6-only so any IPv6-only site will need to have some mechanism  
>to communicate with the vast majority of the Internet that only has  
>IPv4.  Since IPv4 will not be available (thus breaking the base  
>assumption of the "dual stack" transition strategy), the only option  
>I see is NAT.  Since you're already doing NAT, why bother deploying  
>IPv6?
>
>Given inertia and your observation of human nature, it would seem a  
>likely outcome of the impending IPv4 free pool runout will be a vast  
>swamp of IPv4 NAT end points, interconnecting and interconnected with  
>private networks (either IPv4 tunneled through IPv6 or RFC 1918 space).
>

I agree with this assessment.

>Blech.
>

Hey, it is going to keep all of us employed, so don't knock it.  From the
users POV they don't give a rat's ass about IP addressing so they will
always go the cheapest possible.  It will be fugly from the network admin's
POV, but the network admins that can't hack it will find something else to
do, and the rest of us will be paid the big bucks to keep the mess going.

It certainly isn't any worse than dealing with shooting down spammers.

Ted