[arin-ppml] Stepping forward, opening my mouth and removing all doubt about

[William Herrin]

On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 10:36 AM, Stewart Dean <sdean at bard.edu> wrote:
> What is a liberalized transfer policy?

Stewart,

Here's the short version:

>From it's inception through today, ARIN has received allocations of IP
addresses from IANA in large (/8) quantities. ARIN then carves them up
and allocates or assigns them to ISPs and end users respectively.

If the current rate of consumption holds, some time in 2011, IANA will
run out of IP addresses. It will have allocated all possible IPv4
addresses to ARIN and the other registries. Shortly after that, ARIN
will allocate its last IP address to some ISP.

Then what?

A liberalized transfer policy is one possible answer. It would allow
entities which hold allocations or assignments of IP addresses to
"sell" them, that is transfer them to some other entity in exchange
for money or some other consideration. This is largely prohibited by
current policy: You can return addresses to ARIN or you can sell your
entire company (including its address assignments) to someone else but
there's not much in between.

The proponents of a liberalized transfer policy say that the inability
to get new address from ARIN will bring a market into being regardless
of what ARIN does. It falls to ARIN to determine what the constraints
on the market process will be. Should it fail to act, ARIN will lose
its relevance as a resource steward and registry. Address assignment
will devolve into a poorly documented black or gray market process in
which everybody gets hurt.

The opponents of a liberalized transfer policy say that everybody
should just switch to IPv6 which won't have this problem for many
decades. Liberalizing the transfer policy would dilute the urgency
behind deploying IPv6 and bring about all the problems the existing
transfer policy is designed to prevent, like route disaggregation and
hording. Everyone would be hurt by that in the end.

Regards,
Bill Herrin



-- 
William D. Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com bill at herrin.us
3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
Falls Church, VA 22042-3004