[arin-ppml] IANA IPv4 /8 burn rate.... (was Re: Stepping forward, opening my mouth and removing all doubt about)

[Iljitsch van Beijnum]

On 28 aug 2008, at 1:02, Scott Leibrand wrote:

> You're missing the point.  If IPv4 addresses are free (as they are  
> now),
> of course everyone will use a lot of them.  When they become scarce  
> and
> expensive, people will start conserving IPv4.

How is that a good thing?

IPv6 addresses are free, because whatever the cost is, after dividing  
by the number of addresses you get for that cost you're left with  
pretty much only zeros.

So if we start using IPv6, we can use as many addresses as we feel is  
useful, while if we stay with IPv4 we should be happy to pay a lot  
because then we get to say with IPv4...

Trying to stretch IPv4 is both a bad idea and pointless. It's a bad  
idea because then we have to suffer address scarcity for even longer.  
It's pointless because it won't work. Even with all this NAT and the  
restrictive RIR rules and procedures, we ended up using up a hair shy  
of 200 million fresh addresses last year, and more than 130 million so  
far this year. There is no way you can turn this rate into something  
that can be sustained from the deflation of IPv4 by letting out the  
air that's in there.

What we should do is try to make the switch to IPv6 as painless as we  
can. The most important part of that is to make it predictable: we  
need to know what's going to happen in the next 5 years or so. Any  
policy change means that there will be a bigger difference between  
what's being predicted and what will happen, so all policy changes are  
at least somewhat harmful, and potentially very harmful. So we should  
only make the ones that are extremely obvious wins.