[arin-ppml] IPv4 Transfer Policy Change to Keep Whois Accurate

[Matthew Kaufman]

On May 12, 2011, at 3:19 PM, Owen DeLong wrote:

>> 
> 
> Forcing customer to use NAT is not within the scope of ARIN policy and I do not consider the failure or refusal to do so to be a manipulation of need.
> NAT is a degraded subset of internet access services.

My point is that someone with lots of addresses that they *could* free up can still claim they need more fairly easily.

> 
> There are many providers of much smaller size that are equally expert at dealing with ARIN justified need. I do not believe your argument
> hold water.

They don't have enough money to play as the price approaches infinity, however.

> As I said, I think with needs-basis, the value of N tends to be larger than it will be without N.

And I think you're wrong on that point.

> 
>> 
>> One could argue, for instance, that *with* a needs basis Comcast might end up holding nearly all the space... but without a needs basis it might be an investment banking firm instead, who'd then lease the space out to move providers than just Comcast.
>> 
> 
> I think you have a number of assertions there which are not at all proven:
> 
> 	1.	I think it is unlikely $CABLECO could demonstrate 12 month need for all the
> 		addresses on their first go. Other providers and end-users, will therefore be
> 		likely able to obtain some fraction of the address space.

Maybe. But a very small number of players with lots of money and needs justification will be able to dominate the buy side trivially. And very small amounts of gaming turn a /14 of need into a /13 or /12, whereas the same amount applied to a tiny request for a /24 isn't so interesting.


> 
> 	2.	I have no reason to believe that $CABLECO would not be ahead of the
> 		investment banking firm in line for the addresses as I suspect $CABLECO
> 		generally pays more attention to the goings on at ARIN than does
> 		$INVESTMENT_BANK.

One would assume that some of the folks here who have an interest in making money by speculating on IPv4 space are planning on having a source of cash with which to do that.

> 
> 	3.	There is nothing to prove that $INVESTMENT_BANK would not prefer to
> 		lease all the addresses to $CABLECO vs. dealing with multiple tenants.
> 		In fact, there are many things to suggest that such a model would be
> 		highly preferable as it would maintain roughly the same revenue while
> 		simultaneously reducing costs which generally is viewed favorably
> 		by most of the investment bankers I know.

Unknown, but possible. In fact, $CABLECO might be able to afford an exclusive deal. But then this is NO DIFFERENT than $CABLECO going and getting that much space itself.. so who cares? In either case your doomsday scenario of a few big providers holding most of the space happens, and needs justification did nothing to prevent it.

Matthew Kaufman