[ppml] Policy Proposal: IPv4 Transfer Policy Proposal

[michael.dillon at bt.com]

> Is there a scarcity of land on Manhattan?  There certainly is 
> a fixed pool of land there, which is fully utilized.  
> However, that doesn't stop developers from buying land and 
> putting it to more productive use.  No one selling land on 
> Manhattan is risking serious business losses, because they 
> can lease or buy the land they need on the real estate market.

But there are many companies in Manhattan who are *NOT* selling
land because they can't afford to take the risk to their business
of not being in Manhattan. Sometimes events change the level of risk 
such as 9-11 making it clear to the financial services industry
that there was a lower risk if they moved SOME of their operations
away from Manhattan. But NYSE is still there and many companies 
stay in Manhattan to arbitrage the advantage of a few microseconds
less network latency to NYSE.

To date, nobody has show that there is any clear business advantage
for an ISP to stop selling IPv4 services if they have the resources
to do so. The IPv4 runout means that ISPs MUST begin offering IPv6
services, but if they can provide such a good transparent 4-to-6 and
6-to-4 Internet gateway service, that IPv4 customers begin to move
to pure v6 service, there is still no clear reason for the ISP to
NOT use those IPv4 addresses to sell service to customers who still
demand v4.

>  However, 
> I think this proposed transfer policy moves us in the 
> direction of improving the liquidity of the market, 

Moving from an extremely illiquid market to a very
illiquid market really doesn't change things. In either case
you will find it hard to sell IP addresses, hard to figure
out what price to ask, and hard to know if an offered price
is reasonable.

>  One such behavior, 
> IMO, will be address holders freeing up additional addresses 
> to transfer as a rising price makes it worth their while.  

How many hundred thousand dollars per /24 does the price have
to reach before it is worthwhile?

> Our job is to provide responsible stewardship of Internet 
> number resources.  In my opinion, denying organizations 
> access to IPv4 resources so they will "get what they deserve" 
> is the antithesis of stewardship.

You're right. We should be denying them access to IPv4
address blocks because we have run out of them. It's not
our fault that they are running out and we have essentially
zero influence on the decision makers that might return 
unused addresses to the pool, regardless of whether they
can earn 6 figures by doing so.

> Any new business that wants to provide services 
> to the general Internet will need to get IPv4 addresses: how 
> do you propose we meet their needs?

Now you are off in cloud cuckoo land. We need to start with
a basic understanding of the technology here. An IPv4 connected
host can communicate with an IPv6 connected host in the usual
way, through one or more intermediaries. In the IPv4 Internet
we call these intermediaries routers, load-balancers, NAT-boxes. 
Adding IPv6 to the mix also adds NAT-PT boxes, Teredo tunnel servers,
6to4 tunnel servers, tunnel brokers, ISATAP and ALGs (Application
Layer Gateways). These are all things that network operators 
provide for their customers whether in the enterprise or in the
telecom space. So it will be possible for IPv6-connected servers
to provide a service to the general Internet, as well as vice versa.

If an ISP can't make the Internet a basically seamless service,
regardless of IPv6 or IPv4, then they simply won't survive against
their more nimble competition. 

One thing that ARIN staff could do to help this process would be
to run a v6/v4  agnostic and fully transparent meeting network. By
this I mean that you should be able to bring a pure IPv4 laptop or
a pure IPv6 laptop to the meetings, and get equivalent service
including access to any v6 or v4 Internet sites. By fully transparent
I mean that all the technical details of how this service is
supplied should be on display for people to copy and adapt to 
their own networks. Yes, it would mean some development work
on NAT-PT and ALGs to finish the job so that they actually work
in the wild, but this is not an insurmountable task and it fits
in with ARIN's education mandate.

> > It is not against the law to use IP addresses allocated to another 
> > organization if you have no need to communicate with that other 
> > organization. If you talk to systems integrators you will 
> learn that 
> > this is common practice, not just in the enterprise, but 
> you even run 
> > across it inside telecom companies.
> 
> Ouch.  Do you really think such hacks are better than a 
> policy allowing the transfer of IPv4 resources?

Irrelevant. People have been doing this stuff for years and
will undoubtedly continue to do so regardless of what policies
ARIN may enact.

--Michael Dillon