[arin-ppml] Can a personal property approach ever transition into multi-stakeholder, private sector led, bottom-up policy development model?

[David Conrad]

On Apr 28, 2011, at 2:19 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> So, what is your POV?

That a transition to IPv6 is inevitable.

> Secondly, how much of a disincentive does a permanent transfer market
> in IPv4 create towards migration to IPv6?

First, as should be obvious by now, a market in IPv4 is going to exist, regardless of what policies ARIN comes up with to try to stop it.  ARIN simply does not have the enforcement tools to stop it (there is a wildcard here: the USG -- they could, in theory, say 'all your addresses are belong to us' and then dictate what will hapen.  While I don't believe this would remove the market, it would turn it black).

Secondly, right now, the 'market' is wildly distorted by the fact that IPv4 addresses are essentially free. When resources are free, there is no incentive to use them efficiently, look towards alternatives, or come up with technologies that would help transition. I believe this has retarded the deployment of IPv6.  Soon, IPv4 will no longer be essentially free.  Obtaining additional IPv4 addresses is going to have an explicit and likely increasing over time cost.  At some point (when is an interesting question), the cost of obtaining sufficient IPv4 addresses to continue to add customers is going to cross the decreasing over time cost of deploying IPv6.  I believe when this occurs, a tipping point will be reached and deployment of IPv6 will vastly accelerate.

Regards,
-drc