[arin-ppml] Revised -- Policy Proposal 2009-4: IPv4 RecoveryFund

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tom Vest [mailto:tvest at pch.net] 
> Sent: Monday, April 13, 2009 5:23 PM
> To: Ted Mittelstaedt
> Cc: arin-ppml at arin.net
> Subject: Re: [arin-ppml] Revised -- Policy Proposal 2009-4: 
> IPv4 RecoveryFund
> 
> 
> On Apr 13, 2009, at 7:22 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> 
> >
> >
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: arin-ppml-bounces at arin.net
> >> [mailto:arin-ppml-bounces at arin.net] On Behalf Of Tom Vest
> >> Sent: Monday, April 13, 2009 4:07 PM
> >> To: arin-ppml at arin.net
> >> Subject: Re: [arin-ppml] Revised -- Policy Proposal 2009-4:
> >> IPv4 RecoveryFund
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> Lucrative businesses often take root in gaps like this; 
> what's going 
> >> to prevent them from doing so in this case?
> >> More to the point, what's going to motivate the new market 
> makers to 
> >> accept a near-term closure of this particular gap, given the 
> >> possibility of keeping it open indefinitely?
> >>
> >
> > Nothing.  But, there are still people selling old wooden 
> candlestick 
> > telephones for home use:
> >
> > 
> http://www.eurocosm.com/Application/Products/Teleph/150-series-GB.asp
> >
> > "...What distinguishes our range of candlestick telephones 
> is ... the 
> > care we take in producing an attractive museum piece that 
> can be used 
> > every day for making calls..."
> >
> > Once the majority of the Internet has
> > switched to IPv6, there will be plenty of IPv4 available 
> for those who 
> > want to dual-stack for the next 50 years.
> >
> > What matters is what the large networks do - what the 
> majority does.  
> > For where they go, the rest of the world will eventually follow.
> >
> > Ted
> 
> History suggests that what the large networks do may indeed 
> dictate what the rest of the world can/must do.
> But I suspect that we've all noticed that the two 
> activity-sets are rarely the same -- and quite often they 
> represent non-overlapping subsets of the universe of 
> commercial strategies.
> 
> Think about how interconnection works.
> 

I watched first-hand the migration of
corporate networks from IPX to IP as at the time I was not working
for ISPs.

I remember back in 1991 asking the head of the telecom department at
the 300+ person company I was working for at the time if he had
given any thought to TCP/IP and the Internet.  His response was:
"I don't know what your talking about"

3 years later the acting CEO of that company was asking me if
they should spend a whole lot of money on TCP/IP licenses from
Ipswitch.  My response was to wait for win95 - which they did.

By '96, their entire corporate internal LAN and WAN was IP.  I
remember loading '95 on '486's in order to keep people going for
a few more months before the prices on new systems dropped enough
to be able to forklift stuff.

It's not that I was better than these folks.  It was simply that
I had experience with NSF-net as a user, much earlier than any
of them did, and, having first hand experience, I saw the potential
more than they did.

It would not surprise me the least if someone, somewhere was
puttering away on a little insignificant application that
requires IPv6 - and that 5 years from now, will be an absolute
must-have.  This entire discussion over IPv4 could be rendered
moot by something going on right now that we are oblivious to.


Ted