[arin-ppml] Desirability of a more efficient transfer market (was: "Leasing" of space via non-connectivity providers)

[John Curran]

On Feb 6, 2011, at 10:30 AM, Jack Bates wrote:
> On 2/5/2011 11:32 PM, Benson Schliesser wrote:
>> 
>> The specified transfer service, in its current form, is not sufficient to facilitate efficient distribution.  A less-regulated market would be much more dynamic and appealing to buyers and sellers, especially at this stage.
> The problem, i believe, with a less-regulated market is that we'd see much smaller address block transfers, which would jeopardize core routing (as if it's not going to be bad enough). A lot of individual /24 transfers could prove very dangerous for us, while the parties involved in such transfers may not understand or care about the problem. Removing ARIN completely would destroy what use is left in the whois database.

Potential introduction of many smaller routes was identified as 
one of the reasons for holding to existing allocation policy for 
transfers. If this no longer matches the community's expectations,
then it should be discussed again.

There is another effect of having a documented-need requirement
in the transfer policy: because the existing allocation policy 
only provides for short-term relief of a service providers needs,
transfers via the policy can only meet short-term needs for IPv4
address space.  I do not believe that this aspect was discussed
in any detail during the policy discussion, but would also warrant 
consideration. It's been noted that there's a significant amount
of non-routed IPv4 address space, and it's clear that a highly-
efficient market would provide the ability for the well-funded
to satisfy their *long-term* IPv4 requirements, hence allowing 
them to opt out of any consideration of IPv6 altogether.  One 
might argue that this indeed should be an option available to 
well-funded ISPs, and further that if there's sufficient IPv4 
space for the Internet to continue to grow such a manner, then 
IPv6 actually isn't needed. Under that viewpoint, the present 
specified-transfer policy with its short-term transfer limit 
does not suffice.

FYI only; as both sides of this matter have been raised to me as a
non-obvious aspect of the present policy, I felt it worth outlining 
for consideration during discussion.

/John

John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN