[ppml] NANOG IPv4 Exhaustion BoFRe: NANOG IPv4 Exhaustion BoF

[Randy Bush]

Tom Vest wrote:
> Every claim that I've ever heard that a decentralized, 
> every-operator-for-itself resource transfer policy is inevitable 
> starts with the assertion that any rule (and any rulemaker) that gets
> in the way of maximum self-help will be irrelevant in the post-free
> pool world.

see a doctor about your ears

> Markets are not inevitable.

a market already exists, so the inevitability is irrelevant

Scott Leibrand wrote:
> I think everyone is fully in favor of making IPv4 irrelevant through
> widespread adoption of IPv6.

there are at least three other camps, lisp, nat-for-all, and
rabid-anything-but-ipv6.  and they are not insignificant.  this
discussion makes their points well.

Michael Smith wrote:
> If a consortium is formed of the holder of legacy space, in 
> particular, then supply will be regulated by the consortium, not by 
> market forces.  Then, if they're smart, they will regulate prices to
> the highest level the market will bear and sell them off a bit at a
> time.  Think OPEC.

they would have to.  black helicopters are extremely expensive,
especially the invisible ones.

the bogeyperson play, whether the bogeyperson is the igf, the itu, the
evil legacy holders, or whatever is getting pretty childish and boring,
and i now severely discount anyone who tries to play it as a threat.  i
suspect i will like the bogeypeople about as well as the folk here.
there are good apples in every barrel.  and if they think a bit
differently, then it will be an opportunity for me to learn a different
view of the world, always a good thing.

Geoff Huston wrote:
> an april day fools effort (rejected by the RFC Editor, by the way) 
> that rewrote the Kyoto Protocol to talk about BGP Update credits 
> (http://www.potaroo.net/drafts/draft-bert-kyoto-protocol-00.html). 
> The really scary bit is that it has been the closest I've ever seen 
> to the imposition of economic controls on the routing system that 
> could possibly fly.

i take it seriously  lucy makes a strong case that carbon like pool
markets best model what we have here.

> I can't see much point in attempting to suppress or distort an 
> otherwise clear signal of scarcity by creating artificial 
> impediments. Not only does it call into question the legitimacy of 
> the party attempting to impose such constraints, and raise the 
> question of whether such impositions should be accepted by the 
> actors, it seems to me that it leads to no particularly useful space.

at layer 11, i am hearing a lot of noise on the line of "registries
desperately trying to assure a continuing income stream," and "amateur
over- regulators are worse than most markets."  i do not think either is
completely true.  but discussions such as on this list are being read by
folk who wear different and expensive clothes and they are not
impressed.  heck, i am not impressed.  "guns in the hands of children."
 and guns on which more and more of our economies and societies are
increasingly dependent.

Scott Leibrand wrote:
> But most IPs are not used by organizations getting a /24 to 
> multihome.  They are being used by actual devices (computers, home 
> NAT boxes, whatever) with a single public IP per device.

if true, and i have not seen actual measurement, then this is productive
use of a scarce resource.  cool.  how can we increase it?  hint: the
grown-up economists i heard earlier this week said a benefit of a market
is that it finds "best use" for the goods (not magically, of course).

but most routing table slots are being used by TE and asocial pollution
of the commons.  this behavior is non-productive.  i want to stomp it.

John Curran wrote:
> I'd agree with you if there were anything resembling a useful 
> feedback mechanism on the global routing table.  As it is, the only 
> knob available is route filtering, and while that works fine as a 
> tool against needless deaggregation, it really doesn't work well 
> filtering lots of new unique routes from your peers all of which are 
> necessary to cover their new customers...

the latter represents real business and folk with real packets.  the TE
and intentional fragging represents non-product and is worth stomping.

drc wrote:
> Put enough constraints on transfers and people won't bother.  End 
> result: hoarding (for some value of that variable), speculation via a
> black market, etc.  The only thing the policy will have done is 
> decrease ARIN's relevance in the post IPv4 free pool exhaustion world
> since the registration database will become less and less useful 
> over time.

bingo!  much of this discussion is about how best to shoot ourselves, as
an organization and an industry, in the foot.  i suspect we will succeed
in killing ourselves as amateur over-regulators, but the guns will be
removed from our hands before we do serious damage to the industry.

> it would seem the policy is attempting to put ARIN in the position of
> being an arbiter of quite a few thing things it hasn't taken on 
> before, e.g., "fairness" (fair to whom?), "availability" (for whom?),
> "unnecessary deaggregation" (from whose perspective), etc.  I might
> suggest there are many, many mines in that particular field and that
> ARIN is not necessarily in the best position to blaze a path there.

from listening to some economic grown-ups early this week, one of the
take-aways was that these are not simple issues and even the language we
seem to be using is a far from productive.  we amateur regulators are in
way way over our heads, and thrashing is not gonna make us float any
better.  what it will likely do is bring in the professionals, and i am
starting to look forward to that as preferable to all this.

randy