[arin-ppml] Draft Policy 2009-1: Transfer Policy ?Revisedandforwarded to the Board

[michael.dillon at bt.com]

> My feeling has always been that talk of a transfer market is 
> very misguided, that there's plenty of "mineable" IPv4 in 
> allocations already made that have been abandonded, and our 
> reclamation efforts should focus there first.

Lots of that minable IPv4 is in the hands of the ISPs who will
need it. In other words, when some organization realizes that
they need more IPv4 addresses and ARIN can no longer supply them,
they will be able to invest the money into mining their own
supply rather than spending money on buying addresses from 
someone else. Some of these minable addresses might fall under
the category that some people call "hoarding" although I don't
think that is a proper term for it. But lots of them are perfectly
legitimately held IP addresses, for instance assignments to
DHCP pools used by broadband DSL customers.

When the runout occurs, many companies will be able to identify
blocks of IPv4 internally, which do not supply as much profit
per IP address as another service which is short of addresses.
The "mining" activity is to either shut off less profitable 
customers or to forcefully migrate them to IPv6 services. At 
that point, the freed up IPv4 addresses can be repurposed.

Also, most large telecoms companies have a problem with cleaning
up after customers are disconnected, or after they upgrade to 
a service which requires a new circuit. Part of that cleanup 
is to recover the unused IPv4 addresses. There is not a lot of
incenctive to do this cleanup today, but there will be when ARIN
runs out of IPv4. A company where I used to work was spending over
$2 million dollars per month on unused access lines because of
not cleaning up after disconnects.

So, we don't need ARIN to organize any reclamation effort because
the organizations with the minable IPv4 addresses will have plenty 
of incentive to do it themselves.

--Michael Dillon