[arin-ppml] Internet Fairness

Sat Dec 20 10:21:40 EST 2014

Hi Frank,

Network operators ignore the diminishing issues caused by NAT because their 
customers just don't care.
End-to-end died with the advent of NAT and the introduction of firewalls in 
the 1990s.
It's both a relic and pipedream, not a lodestar.

So in your view pure capitalists will buy and hoard IPv4 even as CGN and 
IPv6 conspire to make their hoarded assets less valuable? I am not sure I 
follow your claim that capitalists will seek to acquire (as you say, by 
paying the highest price!) and hoard IPv4? To what end?

Can you extend that to any scenario supporting this behavior should 
regulatory hurdles be marginally reduced per 2014-14, which would preclude 
the hoarding fear by limiting needs-free transfers?

If CGN is so bad, won't a "pure capitalist" seek to profit by offering non 
NATted connections to customers clamoring for it?

Have you ignored the argument about the dispersal of IPv4 space into the 
hands of many disparate organizations over the last 30 years, leaving 
nowhere to solicit the purchase of market-altering quantities of IPv4 space 
and precluding any private and stealthy effort in that regards?

Even the ARIN legal staff reviewed 2014-14 (admittedly not the subject of 
this thread nor your comments) and found that market manipulation would not 
be a reasonable fear, but we continue to hear the claims of manipulation and 
hoarding in the context of the needs-test.

If end-to-end and a flat network is desirable to paying customers, network 
operators will offer that. The dual-stack IPv6/CGN Internet is coming, and 
will provide a venue for competition between these two network concepts. If 
you are confident that IPv6 is superior, then you should be confident that 
capitalism will take us there. Because whether or not one thinks of 
capitalism as good or bad, one thing capitalists tend to do is deliver what 
their customers demand.

Regards,
Mike Burns

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Frank Bulk" <frnkblk at iname.com>
To: "'Adam Thompson'" <athompso at athompso.net>; "Randy Carpenter" 
<rcarpen at network1.net>; "ARIN-PPML at arin.net" <arin-ppml at arin.net>
Sent: Saturday, December 20, 2014 9:37 AM
Subject: Re: [arin-ppml] Internet Fairness

> For those of us in the "NAT is bad"
> (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v26BAlfWBm8) camp, the risk I perceive 
> with
> a purely capitalistic model is that many organizations will sell their 
> IPv4
> address space to the highest bidder (who may hoard it) and even more NAT
> will be deployed.  While the effects of CGN are documented (i.e.
> https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7021), I think that many network operators
> will (choose to) ignore those (to the detriment of their end users) or
> capitalize on that by charging extra to those who don't want to go through
> CGN.  In reaction, applications and services will be further modified to
> address CGN, the opposite of my preferred approach towards end-to-end
> communication.
>
> Frank
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: arin-ppml-bounces at arin.net [mailto:arin-ppml-bounces at arin.net] On
> Behalf Of Adam Thompson
> Sent: Friday, December 19, 2014 9:43 PM
> To: Randy Carpenter; ARIN-PPML at arin.net
> Subject: Re: [arin-ppml] Internet Fairness
>
> On 14-12-19 08:02 PM, Randy Carpenter wrote:
>> A capitalistic model does not work for a finite resource like IP
> addresses.
> I'm not even a Smithian capitalist, and I see the first problem here:
>
> Why doesn't it work?
>
> Market stability will be reached according to every economic theory I've
> read, regardless of whether the resources are finite or not. It may be
> that stability means a gradually-increasing price for a while followed
> by rapid inflation, but estimates I've heard posit that IPv6 deployment
> will be widespread by the time the market price would otherwise skyrocket.
>
>> All that would happen is that a large company could just buy up all of 
>> the
> space, and then set its own price for everyone else.
> Really?  How many universities and large organizations have /8s, /9s,
> and /10s, that they would almost immediately start the process of
> monetizing?  It's "easy" (*cough*) - switch to NAT'd private addresses,
> switch to IPv6, whatever.  Heck, simple disaggregation of large blocks
> would release tons of /16 and longer prefixes based on the usage
> patterns I've seen at most large organizations.  ISPs are not generally
> included in this, they tend to use what they have. IBM, HP/Compaq/DEC,
> MIT, Princeton, Harvard, etc., etc., however, are the poster children
> for low usage.  They just don't have a big enough incentive to worry
> about it yet.
>
> Also, see my previous posts for references to academic treatment of the
> fact that hoarding *isn't a bad thing* in the free market.  Of course,
> this isn't a free market yet, so there's an argument to be made there...
>
>> How's that for "fairness" ?? I don't see how you can argue for treating
> smaller orgs more fairly by proposing to allow large companies to set
> whatever ridiculous price they want.
> The playing field is then level - all new entrants get to simply pay the
> going rate, with no (perceived?) favouritism towards incumbents or large
> entrants.  This assumes there's a reasonable relationship between the
> price of a /16 and the price of a /24, of course. Smith's "invisible
> hand" should, in theory, assure this...
>
>> I still don't get the needs argument at all. If an org can't show that it
> needs the addresses, then why do they need the addresses?
> Why should I have to disclose to a third party exactly what my plans
> are?  Even the IRS (or CRA, here) doesn't need that level of detail.
> I'm sure the NSA knows exactly what my plans are, but if I have deep
> enough pockets, I don't see why this resource - almost alone among all
> common resources both natural and artificial - should be forbidden to me.
>
> The only other example I can think of that is widely-known is New York
> (and elsewhere) Taxicab licenses... and almost everyone except taxicab
> license owners thinks that system is, shall we say, suboptimal.
>
>
>
> All of the points above here are posited on the fact that the US is, at
> least supposedly, a Smithian capitalist society that embraces the free
> market.
> I happen to think capitalism is fundamentally broken, but at the same
> time I'd rather let the market control what I can and can't do rather
> than a handful of regulators who I *know* don't have my interests at
> heart.  (Nor is that their mandate, I don't mean they're behaving
> maliciously!)
>
>
>
>
> In essence, above is theory, below is practical.
>
>
>
>
> Moving on to problems in the areas of policy, bias, and technical:
>> I agree that in the past it was difficult for small non-multihomed orgs 
>> to
> get space. But now that the minimum is a /24, it is so ridiculously easy.
> Does multihoming, per se, meet the (v4) needs test after the policy
> changes in 2014?  If yes, I can live with the situation.  If no, then
> small entities are still getting screwed.
> As a small-to-medium-sized enterprise, I probably NAT my entire company
> behind one or two (possibly not even contiguous) IP addresses, with
> maybe another half dozen publicly-visible servers. But if I want to be
> multi-homed, I must first use >64 public IPs, and come up with a reason
> to use >128 public IPs within a year. What if I just need those 6 or 7
> IPs to be highly available?
>
> Under the current NRPM, the only apparent way a small org can multi-home
> (v4) is to get a reassignment from an ISP, at which point they're stuck
> with that ISP pretty much forever, barring a painful and expensive
> renumbering process (say, ~1000 incoming static VPN tunnels, not all of
> which are under their direct control?).
>
> (I also note that the multihoming justification for IPv6 direct
> assignment is still there, even as the IPv4 justification is gone.)
>
> This is the primary example today of how the NRPM is heavily biased
> towards large organizations and SPs in the end-stages of IPv4 runout.
> Meanwhile, if there were no needs test for /24s, and a healthy transfer
> market, the organization would have the *choice* of paying for PI space
> or choosing alternate workarounds with higher TCO (e.g. DNS-based
> load-balancing, manual load-balancing, etc.). Right now, the small
> organization that doesn't wish to become a sharecropper for their
> incumbent SP is - as far as I can tell from reading the NRPM tonight -
> S.O.L.
>
> The fact they can still get a direct IPv6 allocation is meaningless
> until IPv6 deployment reaches some reasonable density of penetration
> (>40%, roughly), and I don't hear anyone here claiming that will happen
> until we actually run out of IPv4 space, and SPs are no longer able to
> acquire v4 space on demand.  Small organizations already can't acquire
> v4 space on demand - but they don't carry much weight with SPs.
>
> Yes, the reasoning here is *partially* circular, because there are two
> related problems converging to screw the small organization (which group
> includes most of my customers, and in fact, most businesses in Canada).
>
> Another way to view this, which has some relevancy to the problem
> (mentioned earlier today) with separation between ARIN and NANOG, unlike
> APNIC and RIPE which largely combine those functions, is that this
> wouldn't be an issue if global routing tables carried prefixes longer
> than /24.  The main reason that's the case today - as far as I can tell
> - is TCAM space on hardware routers, which directly translates into: 
> Money.
>
> [Rant about certain short-sighted & self-centered ISPs removed, didn't
> add any value to the discussion, no matter how much it made me feel 
> better.]
>
> Right now we have this mixture of regulatory oversight and "market"
> forces that indirectly control said regulatory oversight... this isn't
> IMHO a healthy model, and any steps we can take to move either to a pure
> regulatory function *or* a pure market-driven regime should improve the
> situation.  Given that ARIN is located in the U.S., a pure market-driven
> regime seems like a better idea right now.
>
> Regardless, small organizations are - right now - impossibly
> disadvantaged if they want PI space for any reason, especially 
> multi-homing.
>
>
> If I've misread the NRPM v2014.4 (2014-Sep-17), feel free to correct my
> interpretation... the only provision for low-usage multihoming of IPv4 I
> could find is 4.2.3.6, which is commercially punitive, at least in my
> region.
>
> -- 
> -Adam Thompson
>  athompso at athompso.net
>  Cell: +1 204 291-7950
>  Fax: +1 204 489-6515
>
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