[ppml] NANOG IPv4 Exhaustion BoF

[michael.dillon at bt.com]

> The part that I'm still waiting to see answered is how the 
> rest of the world gets access to the excess IPv4 legacy space 
> that exists in the ARIN region. 

Just take it. If you have no need to communicate with North American
sites, then just use whatever addresses you want. It would be a good
idea to first make sure that you don't see any regional traffic to
the address range that you pick, and that the range does not contain
some internationally important hosts like, for instance, the DNS servers
of a major video hosting site.

Outside of the former British colonies, there is less and less interest
in exchanging traffic with North America. The needs of travellers and
emigrant communities are not big enough for EVERY foreign ISP to
maintain
universal connecity. In fact, it's not really possible to measure how
universal your connectivity is so we don't even know how many ISPs
already
survive quite well without it. Even in such a fundamental category as 
search engines, French, Germans and Russians are more likely to use
www.voila.fr, www.abacho.com and www.rambler.ru than they are to use
www.google.fr, www.google.de and www.google.ru.

If people find that there is value in prolonging the life of the IPv4 
Internet in order to delay deploying IPv6, then it will not be the
IPv4 Internet as we know it from the 1990s. It will be a more fragmented
Internet, but still increasingly useful to the individual users who
depend on it.

> A policy that only allows 
> transfer of space between entities in the ARIN region 
> certainly won't fly with the likes of the WTO.

In Europe, all of the largest ISPs are members of an organization
called ETNO, and they are unanimous that there should be no IP
marketplace. Here is what they presented at RIPE 55

   No IP Marketplace
   - ETNO believes that a marketplace in IP addressing is
     contrary to the principles of fair play and conservation
     through which IP addresses have been allocated in the past
   - Development of a market for IP addresses should be
     strongly discouraged
   - Legal, informal and illegal trading of IP addresses should be
     strongly discouraged
   - RIPE - as well as its membership - should identify strategic
     actions that would help meet this goal

If ARIN allows transfer of address blocks for money, it will likely be
the only RIR to do so.

--Michael Dillon