[arin-ppml] Policy Proposal 102: Reduce and Simplify IPv4 Initial Allocations

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

Seth Mattinen wrote:
> Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
>> Seth Mattinen wrote:
>>>
>>> Having recently has a glimpse into the world snowshoe I have a different
>>> view. There is so much space being "rented" right now it's not even
>>> funny. A huge amount of it sits around idle so it will "clean up". I can
>>> get multiple /18's and up with a phone call and enough money. We don't
>>> have to wait for runout, these guys will be ready and willing to sell
>>> addresses to a brand new market when the time comes.
>>>
>>
>> If your right and the hoarders flood the market with IPv4 once the RIR's
>> run out, then so be it - I guarantee that if what they do causes a
>> problem, the ARIN community will shut it down.  That's the problem 
>> with designing a business plan around hoarding - it's going to
>> be tolerated only as long as you don't make a nuisance of yourself.
> 
> That's the fun thing I learned. They're borrowing space from people who 
> have a surplus for a fee. Normally this surplus should be returned to 
> ARIN especially since we're all panicky about IPv4 runout, right? Wrong.
> 
> This is a bit OT, but here's what I know. Mr. W needs some address space 
> at his colo. He can't qualify via the colo's rules or ARIN's. Mr. X 
> calls himself an IP broker. All he does is arrange people that have 
> spare IP space with people who need some IP space for whatever reason. 
> Let's say me the ISP has an /18 that's unused. Mr. X will give me $Y to 
> borrow that /18 for Z amount of time. He will turn around and tell Mr. W 
> that he can advertise that /18 at his colo for $Y+markup. One of my 
> friends who does consulting somehow got involved with Mr. X and started 
> to see dollar signs. It took me several weeks of being totally confused 
> to get behind the curtain and tell everyone I wasn't interested in 
> letting other people reannounce my space outside of my AS.
> 
> Wasn't there a policy to encourage return of resources? 

Yes, it's called "fees"

> I don't 
> remember. ARIN would have to find these orgs who are renting their space 
> out to brokers and revoke it somehow to put a stop to it.
> 

No reason to.  ARIN charges org X with the spare space a fee, org X 
charges org Y who needs space, a fee.  The main thing is that the IP
addressing is in use.  All Org's X responsibility to ARIN is that they
keep it utilized and maintain the SWIPS on it.

Those people aren't the problem.  The problem are the orgs getting
the space then doing nothing with it.

> 
>>>
>>> If I had PA space (I don't) and that happened, I would just pass it on
>>> to the customer as a fee.
>>
>> which then triggers the scenario you originally described, the
>> "screw this, if I have to renumber anyway, goodbye" which your
>> trying to avoid, I thought.
> 
> Yes, but I'm between a rock and a hard place, as you said. Can't afford 
> to absorb the fee, can't pass it on. I don't have an answer.
> 

Yes, you do, but you won't like it.  That is, you make a business
decision to keep paying the LIR who assigned you space, so your
customer doesn't have to renumber.  You recognize that as long as
your paying less to the LIR in fees than your charging the customer,
your making money.

If the LIR comes to you and says "we are going to raise rates" you tell
them "I will cut service if you raise rates" (this assumes you know
your customer won't pay anymore)  Then the LIR has to decide
if they are going to raise rates or not.  If they do, then you cut 
service, and tell your customer that either vendor loyalty has meaning
or it don't, and if it don't, well there's plenty of other customers
out there where it does, and your going to service them.  Obviously,
you do it in a nice way with the usual offers of assistance to ease
the pain of staying with you, but under the velvet, that's what it is.

Ultimately, your not really making the decision - your customer is.
Granted, they may make a decision disadvantageous to you.  But in the
long run if you know that's probably going to happen sometime in the
future years, you can plan now to find other customers or do whatever
so that when they leave, you will have something else to make money on.

My employer purchased an ISP many years ago named "Clacknet"  We knew
when we bought it that all the customers would eventually leave. (it
was small, 100 customers on the books, 30 of them freebies)  And 
eventually they did.  But, that's a perfectly legitimate
business plan when there is no hope of building the business, due to
how it's structured.  It can be depressing, of course, but look at
all of those outsource houses that handle dialup today for ISPs.
Dialup is shrinking, but those guys are making money by aggregating all
of the shrunken dialups from different ISP's together.  Undoubtedly
some of them won't survive as dialup use gets smaller and smaller,
and the bigger ones will buy out the smaller ones.

> 
> 
>>>
>>> Are there really any ISP's out there operating on a single /24 anymore?
>>> (serious question) The days of small ISP's with a rack-o-modems in the
>>> back room is long gone. No policy change we make will motivate anyone.
>>>
>>
>> I think there's WISP's operating out there with 2 or 3 /24's.
> 
> Then they probably already qualify as is unless they're single-homed. If 
> they're multihomed and running on a lot of PA space due to lack of 
> education
> 
> 
>>>
>>> We can't really do anything about pre-ARIN or existing agreements, so
>>> it's best to forget about it and move on and up. But I don't believe
>>> they are all planning on IPv6 in the near term. See my recent somewhat
>>> public fight with Verizon re: exactly that. Maybe if someone could
>>> convince the world to route IPv6 as fully as IPv4... but no, they're
>>> trying to keep costs down, and *not* supporting IPv6 completely is part
>>> of that goal.
>>>
>>
>> There is a famous old quote (which I can't find the source to right now)
>>
>> "My enemies make their plans out of wire, I make my plans out of 
>> string, because string is a lot more flexible than wire"
>>
>> I suspect that a lot of them are making their IPv6 deployment plans
>> out of string.
>>
> 
> Well, I've been IPv6 ready since 2005. It's still a horrible struggle to 
> get upstream support though, which makes the quality suffer a bit more 
> than IPv4, which means people aren't as interested, etc. all the way 
> downhill.
> 

Just keep plugging and don't let the bastards get you down.

Ted

> ~Seth
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