[arin-ppml] Why are ISPs allowed?

[michael.dillon at bt.com]

> Not to mention the unofficial response which would be 
> even more deadly.

Big companies have shareholders, stock analysts and the 
SEC to worry about. They have to answer questions about
IPv6 truthfully and they can't hide any known issues that
could have a material impact on the company.

> I think your going to see the "giant ISP's" collude with each 
> other to present a unified front to the customers - 
> approximately a year or so after IPv4 runout, all of them 
> will announce that they cannot hand out new IPv4 to customers 
> unless the customer pays a premium for it.  It is in their 
> own selfish self-interest to do this.

This won't be collusion. It will be because they all rely on the
same set of vendors for boxes that support IPv6, and when those
vendors all reach a certain point of IPv6 support, all the ISPs
will move to v6 more or less at the same time. This is good for
the consumer because it increases the network effect of IPv6 and 
ensures that they will be able to get some communications value
out of the switch. Since a consumer customer is inherently less
profitable than a business customer, and their technical disruption
of going to IPv6 is minimal and controlled, it makes sense for all
ISPs to mine for IPv4 by migrating consumers to IPv6. This will
allow them to continue to provide IPv4 service to the slower moving
businesses for years and years. Hosting providers seem to be the
first organizations to take IPv6 seriously (think Google Docs) 
probably because their scaling and load-balancing architectures
are well thought out and can handle shifting to IPv6 as 
consumer traffic builds.

> Check out the almost unified screaming by the television 
> industry to the Obama administrations move to push back the 
> HDTV broadcast switchover from Feb 17th.

This is an excellent event for IPv6. Now we have a concrete way
to tell people in the USA that they have to act and cannot
delay the change. The IPv4 runout is not like the switch to
digital TV where you can delay things by legislating it. It's
like the millenium bug where you have to get stuff fixed now,
not later.

--Michael Dillon