[arin-ppml] About needs basis in 8.3 transfers

[Mike Burns]

Hi Matt,
I put my comments below your signature.
Regards, 
Mike
See, this is why I support maintaining the
needs-based decisionmaking around number
allocations.

Because it's far too easy for a really big company
with a couple of billion dollars in the bank to decide
that IPv6 is just too hard, and it's easier to buy up

large blocks of IPv4 space, and keep their critical
resources on v4 addresses--which, if those resources

are crucial enough, could artificially drive up demand
for IPv4.

Matt


Hi Matthew,

It would be simple to see that somebody is buying up IPv4 addresses and the price would rise accordingly, thwarting his plans.
Anybody engaged in that behavior would have to first find the sellers, a considerable problem, and impossible to do silently.
Then he would have to do hundreds and hundreds of transactions, which would take a long time and everybody would see it in the public transfer lists posted by the RIRs.
Worldwide there have been less than 1500 transfers.
My rough number is about 24 million total addresses have been bought or sold since 2010, leaving out intra-company transfers.

You seem to think there is somebody, somewhere you can tap on the shoulder and offer a couple of billion and he can transfer hundreds of millions of addresses to you.  Without the needs test, you can be sure every transfer will be booked and visible, unlike those transfers driven underground by the needs test. That visibility, and innate seller fragmentation,  is our protection against this kind of scheme. 

IMO, the mobile phone operators are not going to invest and risk billions of dollars on a reputationally dangerous ploy like this. Instead they simply appropriate some DoD space and run CGN. Or they could turn on IPv6, which is not “hard” but which is fruitless in today’s Internet.

Although we may not agree on the risks here, are you in agreement that limiting needs-free transfers to one /16 per year per registrant would effectively obviate the fears of the activity you describe?

Regards,
Mike
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