[arin-ppml] Policy Proposal 2008-6

[michael.dillon at bt.com]

> Actually it matters a lot.  There will be (are) many small 
> businesses who will need IP addresses and depend on them for 
> their business who will not be able to afford them.  This 
> tips the balance heavily in the favor of the big players and 
> against the small guy and against the consumer who will 
> ultimately have to pay for it.

In 1995 the big telecom companies were building out ATM networks
and the big PC magazines were touting ATM to the desktop, and
some kind of multichannel interactive cable-TV system called 
the information highway. In the meantime, the little guys were
building services using an uncommon protocol called IPv4. Uncommon
in the sense that there were few commercial offerings of IP and
few books or courses teaching it.

Why would the IPv6 transition be all that different? It seems
to me that small businesses are much sharper than large ones
since their decisions are a matter of life or death for the
business. Knowing that IPv4 exhaustion is only a couple of 
years away, why would any small business put themselves in 
a position where their business is DEPENDENT on IPv4?

I think this is mostly a non-issue. Some mid-sized businesses
will back themselves into a corner and die. Some big ones will
wound themselves seriously and end up being acquired. Let it be.

> Option C is already on the table.  It includes creating a 
> larger pool of addresses to draw from.  Sound familiar?

Over the past year there has been an awful lot more IPv6 activity
within the big ISPs. Most of it rather quiet and only involving
large customers because it is still in trial mode. But when the
IPv4 address shortage really begins to bite and the hoarders come
out offering to sell address blocks for a million or two, these
big ISPs will thumb their noses at the speculators and turn on
reasonably full-featured commercial IPv6 services.

It's now a done deal. 

Forget about the few who complain that they can't make it happen in
time because their corporate corpses will feed the rest of us.

--Michael Dillon

Happy New Year!
May 2009 be the year of IPv6.