[ppml] NANOG IPv4 Exhaustion BoF

[Leo Bicknell]

In a message written on Thu, Mar 06, 2008 at 10:14:05PM -0800, David Conrad wrote:
> > But say if Warren Buffet decided to buy up every prefix,
> > drive up prices and then dole them out with an eye dropper, that would
> > distort the market.
> 
> Very true.  I believe one theory is that such a course of action would  
> _strongly_ encourage IPv6 deployment and hence, would not necessarily  
> be a bad thing.  The implication being that if you believe IPv6 is the  
> right way to go, minimal restrictions would have the most positive  
> long term effect, albeit it may result in a bit of initial  
> "discomfort"...

This statement is true, but potentially misleading.

There are a number of scenarios under which the price for resources
in a market would skyrocket.  I think there is wide agreement that
if the price is high enough it is less pain to move to IPv6.

The issue for many though is how we "hit the wall".  One of the
major arguments for a transfer policy is that having a "hard stop"
date is painful to the industry.  We can't just run out of IPv4 and
switch to IPv6.  However, if speculators were to enter the market,
that's exactly what could happen.  Over the course of a very short
period of time (perhaps a month, maybe less) speculators could drive
the price to a point where no ISP can afford it, and there is a
rapid migration to IPv6.

Thus if your motivation is that hitting the wall is bad, then the
speculator's driving up prices and causing a switch is likely to
seem in the same league, if not worse as people may have been lulled
into a false sense of security by the existence of a white market.

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
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