[arin-ppml] Fairness of banning IPv4 allocations to somecategoryof organization

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

Milton L Mueller wrote:
>> [1] Section 3.3., "The Transferable Address Block Lease (TABL)," in
>>  Mueller, "Economic Factors in the Allocation of IP Addresses." 
>> http://www.itu.int/net/ITU-T/ipv6/ 
>> http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-t/.../T3B020000020003PDFE.pdf
> 
> Tom Thanks for calling attention to the ITU report, I was actually
> unaware that it had finally been released publicly.
> 
> Understand what this report is. ITU was authorized by its member
> states to investigate its possible role in IPv6 address allocation.
> In connection with that mandate, it commissioned two reports. One,
> performed by the NAV6 center in Malaysia, investigated the
> possibility of doing IPv6 allocation by having the ITU delegate
> address blocks to Country Internet Registries (CIRs). The other,
> performed by me, investigated the use of “market forces” as an
> alternative to both ITU delegation and RIR needs assessment in v6
> allocation. As was written in the report, “The purpose of [the
> report] is not necessarily to advocate market-oriented policies, but
> simply to gain a better understanding of what options exist and what
> implications they might have for [IPv6] address management.”
> 
> As an organization whose members are nation-states, ITU obviously
> favors the CIR approach. ITU should be credited, however, with some
> degree of impartiality and integrity for its willingness to support
> an exploration of other alternatives. (It is worth noting that its
> staff's reaction to my critique of needs-based allocation was similar
> to yours.)
> 

There are no other realistic alternatives.  ITU supported an
exploration because it's obvious that the opponents of a CIR approach -
conservatives like you - are all favoring a Wild West, sale to the
highest bidder market for IP addresses, and they might as well
document how terrible that would be for all to see.

You did your job admirably - but you still fail to grasp or respond
to the underlying critique of a market-oriented policy when it comes
to IP assignments, namely that by turning the Internet into a
rich man's playground, it will destroy the fundamental usefulness of
it.

> Contrary to your representation, the report takes full account of the
> relationship between address allocation and routing, and indeed
> constitutes one of the first attempts to understand that relationship
> from the standpoint of institutional economics theory. Obviously, a
> lot more sophisticated analysis could be and needs to be done (and
> not just apologetics for the status quo such as yours). The report
> refers repeatedly to the “interdependence of routing and addressing,”
> and says in Section 1.1, “The policy problem we are faced with is
> not, in fact, one of efficiently allocating IP addresses per se. The
> overarching problem is actually the efficiency and scalability of
> Internet routing. The possession of IP addresses is significant and
> valuable only insofar as they can be used to route packets on the
> public Internet.” Please read section 1.3 for further analysis.
> 

You cannot expect the mindless market to distribute IP addressing to
enhance Internet access for everyone.  Introducing the market merely
changes the IP address distribution to favor the wealthy.

> Your attempt to criticize the report’s approach to the impact of
> TABLs on routing misses the mark. You commit a simple logical error,
> or perhaps didn’t actually read the proposal details, or maybe are
> simply misrepresenting what was said, it is hard to tell. You imply
> that address blocks would be auctioned when in fact, the report
> considers and rejects auctions as a method for initial allocation of
> ipv6 address blocks. See section 3.2. It proposes, instead, that RIRs
> use fees geared to size of address blocks to allocate resources. The
> TABL proposal specifies that blocks so allocated cannot be
> disaggregated and parcelled out to other ASs. By saying that the
> proposal "would not make the current system any worse or any better
> with respect to routing table growth" my point was that for routing
> purposes it matters not at all whether the initial allocation of ipv6
> address blocks is based on “need” as defined by RIRs or on the basis
> of fees, as suggested in the report – what matters is the size of the
> blocks and the degree to which they are disaggregated. Can you
> dispute that?
> 

Once you replace need-based distribution into a market with
fee-based distribution, what follows
is lots of economic power that over time will erode all of the safeties
installed in the initial market - such as your specification that blocks
so allocated cannot be deaggregated.

The moment that it would be economically advantageous to a wealthy org
to break this rule, the rule would be broken and discarded.

This is exactly what happened in the US housing market - originally the 
financial controls were installed to prevent the housing runup - these
controls were chafed against by the wealthy, for many years, until
eventually the wealthy managed to take over and remove them - and within
10 years, the market exploded and collapsed.

That is the ultimate end to all market-based solutions like you 
conservatives advocate because you continually ignore the intrusion of
political power into the market and it's corrupting influence.  The
battle cry of the conservatives is that "those" wealthy corrupting
conservatives that destroy controls aren't "real" conservatives, the
problem is in the people making poor choices, not in a flawed system.

You fail to see that a flawed system rewards poor choices and penalizes
good choices, thus it's ultimately going to influence even the best
people to make flawed choices.  (such as the TARP bailout)

Ted