[arin-ppml] On the topic of longer prefixes...

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

William Herrin wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 6:53 PM, <michael.dillon at bt.com> wrote:
>>> Figure the
>>> first step in the crusade will be something along the lines
>>> of regular utilization audits
>> Sounds a lot like the way the NANPA handles telephone number
>> blocks in North America.
> 
> Of course, that's not the only way. "Underutilized" addresses could be
> ferreted out by a simple expedient of charging every registrant a
> dollar for every address they hold and paying them ten bucks for each
> one they return to ARIN. If that yields a glut of addresses then next
> year its fifty cents and five bucks. If addresses are still scarce
> then next year its two bucks and twenty. Kinda like real estate taxes
> discourage you from holding on to prime real estate that you're using
> in a low-value manner.
> 

Real estate taxes do this??!?!?!?

I can tell you that in the area I live in, price for a standard
residential city lot of 100x50 feet is something around $100K
right now.  20 years ago it was around $35K   Property taxes
are 1.5% (as a result of a ballot measure years ago) so over
that 20 years the owners of that undeveloped lot would have
paid $20,240 in property taxes - and thus would have still
realized a profit on the sale of the lot today of $44,760
even though they never developed it, allowing for those taxes.

Likely it would have been greater since this assumes linear
growth of land value when in actual fact the growth around
here bubbled significantly in the last decade.

And your saying real estate taxes discourage you to hold on
to prime real estate your using in a low-value manner?  Can
you explain exactly how this works, please? I know I'm not that
good in math but I didn't think I was that bad!!!

Seriously, your making many sweeping assumptions here.  There's
no guarantee that a fee-per-IP number will result in return of
anything.  An IP holder may engage in speculation and fundamentally
a speculator is betting the market will be favorable to them,
and if they think that they can simply pay some fees to hold on to
a very scarce resource they may do so.  The existence of such a
fee may merely serve to tremendously drive up costs of 3rd party
directed transfers in which case the speculator would be encouraged
to hold on to the IP addresses in the hopes the price will
climb even higher.

A fee might serve to tremendously constrain the availability
of IPv4 for the first several years of IPv4 runout as the
price skyrockets, then dump massive amounts of it on the market
4-5 years after IPv4 runout.  You could end up doing serious
damage to ISP's who cannot get IPv4, then just when people
are starting to be resigned to the unavailability of IPv4
and starting to get serious about IPv6, along comes the IPv4
speculators crash and now everyone thinks there's plenty of
IPv4 - and IPv6 efforts are then smashed.

Ted