[arin-ppml] IPv6 Heretic thoughts

[Kevin Kargel]

My own humble and paranoid (and hopefully primarily erroneus) feeling is
that the transfer process is being pushed by a few individuals who plan or
hope to take a large short term profit.  I am an ISP and I know that I would
not enjoy competing to pay top dollar for addresses.  

What follows here will border on being a theistic rant, so feel free to quit
here.  

I am heartily afraid of a number of things should this come to pass.  First
and formost is that it would add more than significant cost to doing
business.  This would be passed on to end users, with the end result of
pushing the affordability of internet access out of the hands of common
people, further stratifying the class structure in our society.  Upper
middle and higher income classes will have more access to information and
services, while middle and lower income classes will be kept at a
disadvantage.  The class boundaries will be harder to cross when the tools
are further restricted.  It will be more difficult for the lower class
student to compete fairly with the upper class student who has fast and
instant access to references at home. 

The additional cost will neither help nor hinder business.  So long as the
playing field is level then resource capital expenditure is largely
transparant and transitory.  It is passed to the consumer, and the only
effect business sees is a small profit increase due to markup as it passes
through.  

Small business will be at a distinct disadvantage in getting and maintaining
connectivity.  As with everything advantages of scale will apply, and the
small business that needs a /24 will pay orders of magnitude more (per
unit)for PI than will the megacorp that purchases a /8.  Permitting
commercialization or converting IP addresses to a commodity will further the
advantages of monopolistic business, and will severely handicap the SBO or
family business.

The industry that we are in is more than a business, we have direct impact
on society and quality of life, and thereby we have more than normal
responsibility to safeguard the public interest (Use the power wisely,
Luke)..  Our decisions cannot be based entirely on business and bottom line.


I am a median line capitalist, and I do believe that capitalistic drivers
are good and necessary for shaping business.  Having said that it is
expressly the cooperative anarchy that has let the internet develop into the
wonderful and functional entity that it is.  Without the free thinking
methods of open source and the tremendous works of organizions such as ARIN
the various standards bodies the Internet would not have evolved into the
amazing thing we have today.  

Turning IP addresses into a commodity with a unit cost does one more thing,
it makes it easier for goverments to quantify, tax and control the
commodity.  This in itself has terrifying possibilities.

OK, I will step down from my soapbox for a while again..  I apologize for
taking your time with my rant, but Heretic Thoughts seemed the appropriate
place to be.

-----Original Message-----
From: arin-ppml-bounces at arin.net [mailto:arin-ppml-bounces at arin.net] On
Behalf Of Owen DeLong
Sent: Friday, September 05, 2008 11:51 AM
To: Milton L Mueller
Cc: PPML
Subject: Re: [arin-ppml] IPv6 Heretic thoughts

> I am not sure I understand your point here. Exactly what 
> infrastructure changes did you suggest that would ensure someone in 
> the 2-way radio space that they would "never be unable to get 
> frequencies?"
>
> Further, if you were advising the FCC in the mid-1980s (as I was) and 
> they were faced with 6-10 different radio services contending for the 
> same narrow band of frequencies, how would you have told them to 
> handle the contention for the resource if not through auctions?
>
The FCC auction system has had numerous problems.  Were the FCC to apply
auctioning across the board, how much spectrum do you think would still be
available to Amateur Radio Operations or Public Services as primary users?
What if the Military had to add their spectrum demands into their budget?

The reality is that the FCC has chosen a non-auction mechanism for the vast
majority of spectrum and uses auctions to dispense what is left after they
have allocated spectrum to non-commercial uses that are considered important
by the FCC.

This is a VERY GOOD thing as the results of pure auctioning would be
terrible and produce a spectrum chart that did not work at all well with the
rest of the world (which would be especially tragic in the HF bands).

I think that what would happen if you turned the entire RF spectrum over to
the auction process is an excellent example of why dollars might not be the
best method for measuring where IP addresses should go.

Owen

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