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

[Stephen Sprunk]

Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
>> On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 3:55 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt 
>> <tedm at ipinc.net> wrote:
>>     
>>> 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.
>>>       
>> I have yet to connect to a residential Internet service (be it 56k modem, DSL or cable) that has assigned me an RFC1918 address. The blackberry on my belt even appears to be using its own globally routeable IP address.
>>
>> How many hundreds of millions of addresses are consumed by similar uses?
>>
>> Is it your position that more than 10% of those users would be inconvenienced by having an RFC 1918 address behind a NAT box instead?
>>     
>
> No, however the issue is that with those large ISP's almost certainly a percentage of their customers are running some app that is dependent on a public IP.

A percentage that are making use of their public IP for inbound 
traffic?  Yes.  However, what percentage is that, and what fraction of 
them are actually "dependent" on it?  I'd venture to say that the vast 
majority of consumers that have a port mapping through their home NAT/FW 
device are using it for gaming and/or P2P, both of which violate most 
ISPs' AUPs anyways.  Still, those are a tiny fraction of the overall 
population, most of whom are still trying to figure out how to use IE5 
and don't have a clue what a "public address" or "port mapping" is.

> The large ISPs do not want to have to deal with the thousands of irate phone calls that would result out of their million+ customer base if they just arbitrairly switched people over to private IP numbers.
>   

And, from the perspective of most monopoly or duopoly providers, that is 
an opportunity to "upsell" them to public IP service, just like the 
thousands of irate phone calls they get today about being given a 
dynamic IP address are an opportunity to upsell them to static IP service.

Also, at the same time those customers would be moved to NAT or NAT-PT 
for IPv4, they could be given public, static IPv6 addresses for free, to 
use instead of public, static IPv4 addresses.

> Now, this does not mean that they couldn't do a gradual switchover, I agree.  But I don't agree that it is for us to force them to do it.
>   

On that, we agree.  However, it is not "us" that will be doing the 
forcing but rather IPv4 exhaustion, caused by the victims' own consumption.

S