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

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: arin-ppml-bounces at arin.net 
> [mailto:arin-ppml-bounces at arin.net] On Behalf Of Stephen Sprunk
> Sent: Wednesday, August 27, 2008 9:21 AM
> To: Alain Durand; ARIN PPML
> Subject: Re: [arin-ppml] Stepping forward, opening my mouth 
> and removing all doubt about
> 
> 
> Alain Durand wrote:
> > On 8/27/08 11:24 AM, "William Herrin" <bill at herrin.us> wrote:
> >> 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.
> >>     
> >
> > Then there is also those who say, me included, that a liberalized 
> > transfer policy will not solve the problem at all. Recent 
> ARIN stats 
> > showed that most addresses have been allocated in large or 
> very large 
> > blocks. This is a direct consequence of the market concentration. 
> > Other recent data showed that what would be potentially 
> available via 
> > a liberalized transfer policy would mostly be legacy Bs & Cs. Those 
> > blocks are simply too small to meet the global demand.
> >   
> 
> OTOH, there are several large companies that have legacy As, which 
> currently have no incentive to return them to ARIN.  Many 
> could renumber 
> into a /16 or less, using NAT, if only they had the financial 
> motivation 
> to incur that cost; ditto for the hundreds of companies sitting on 
> multiple Bs that could renumber into a /24 if motivated.  

Please don't use straw men.  If you know of any, cite who they are.

> However, that 
> still only buys us another year or two at current growth rates...
> 
> Plus, I don't hear many folks here being sympathetic to the 
> big ISPs in 
> the first place, since they're the ones consuming most of the address 
> space and causing problems for the rest of us. 

This is not correct - those big ISP's are big because they have a
lot of customers - those customers are the ones using the IP numbers.

If you passed a law tomorrow that said all ISP's must shrink their
customer base to 1000 customers or less, you would create huge
amounts of free IPv4 numbers at the large ISPs - which would then have
to be moved to the small ISP's that all the customers would have
to move to - and thus you end up with no net gain in free IPv4.

> These ISPs have the 
> market power to force their vendors to support IPv6,

They do and they are.  All major router vendors today support
IPv6.  And we are even starting to see IPv6-compliant code
in SOHO routers now.  All current Windows, Mac and UNIX os
support IPv6.

Where is this equipment that vendors aren't supporting IPv6 on
that these big ISP's can apply pressure?

That may have been true a few years ago but that ship has
sailed.

> which 
> would trickle 
> down to the smaller players, but so far there's been little visible 
> motion on that front.

Please give examples, this is rediculous.  Even the Ebay discards
now from the bigger ISP's are supporting Ipv6.

> They're the ones that are going to be hit the 
> hardest in the coming crunch, given their rates of 
> consumption, so they 
> _have_ to go to IPv6 with NAT-PT (or multi-layered IPv4 NAT) 
> in the near 
> future.  Once they do, though, they could return most of their IPv4 
> space, which would eliminate the address space depletion 
> problem for the 
> rest of the community...
> 

If they go to NAT-PT or multilayer NAT it will be for their NEW
customers, they won't be changing their legacy customers out.
Doing this will not free up IPv4.

> There are lots of paths out of this problem, and I'm sure that the 
> Internet will keep on working no matter which one we choose.  
> Transfers 
> seem to minimize short-term pain, but forcing a transition to 
> IPv6 would 
> minimize long-term pain.  Do we have the guts, as Lincoln did, to 
> destroy the Internet in order to save it? 

WE can't force anything.  When IPv4 runout happens, the most logical
thing will be for the ISP's to tell BRAND NEW customers that they
must use IPv6.  This requirement will be SO NOT A PROBLEM for your
typical Windows Vista user on a cable modem or DSL modem, the
ISP will simply supply a bridged modem, and the user will plug
their OS in and be able to surf the web and read e-mail as before.

Who will get SCREWED are the customers who have OLD technology
networks - like a shop full of Windows 98 systems and a NT4 server -
and who are using IPv4 with an ISP, then for whatever reason get
their panties in a twist at that ISP and decide they are going to
sneak off in the middle of the night to one of that ISP's competitors.
THOSE will be the folks screeching at their new ISP who is telling
them they have to use IPv6 that to heck with you, we aren't going
to forklift upgrade our network and pay all that money.  Then they
go down the street to yet another ISP who tells them the same thing.
Well tough cookies, they shouldn't have left their first ISP in
the beginning.

The only really serious barrier I see to IPv6 on the Internet
at this time is a handful of 2nd tier national networks who
are still running IPv4 backbones and haven't yet picked up the
cluephone.  And that should be solved by their ISP customers
insisting at contract renewal time that native IPv6 support
be provided or they will not renew.  And the more of the small
ISPs we can educate about this, the faster that will happen.

Ted