[arin-ppml] About needs basis in 8.3 transfers

[Matthew Petach]

On Wed, Jun 11, 2014 at 7:59 AM, Mike Burns <mike at iptrading.com> wrote:

>    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.
>

Except that one conspicuous feature of a market is that it
brings together the sellers in one place so that the buyers
can find them.

The stock market wouldn't work terribly well if everyone
did everything individually.  It only works because there's
a common place where buyers and sellers congregate
together.


> 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.
>

As every hostile takeover expert in investment banking
on wall street can tell you, you don't do the transactions
under your own name; you have holding companies
start doing the transactions, a bit at a time, so that you
can fly under the radar as long as you can, until it's
too late for anyone else to react and change the outcome.



> 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.
>

And that open visibility works *so* well for preventing
hostile takeovers in the stock market, right?

Oh wait--that's why companies enact poison pill
clauses; because often the transactions are so
distributed and so randomized that by the time
you realize you're being taken over, it's too late
to stop it; so the poison pill allows you to dilute
the stock to the point where the hostile takeover
has to chase an asymptotic curve.

Unfortunately, in 32-bit land, there's no such
safety belt; we can't issue additional number
resources to prevent a hostile takeover situation
like that.



>
> 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.
>

I didn't say the mobile phone operators.
They only control one piece of the equation;
they can't effectively lock the communication
channel down.

I said the OS vendors.  They have the capital
and the control of both ends of the socket;
the client device, and the OS upgrade/patch
servers.  Those are the players I'm most afraid
of right now.  And having one of the big three
that has already made one of the biggest
IP space acquisition bids in history step
forward and say "hey, we need to be able
to do more of this in an unfettered manner"
scares the bejeezus out of me--and I don't
even know what a bejeezus is.




>
> 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?
>

A /16 is really freakin' big.  When I'm being paid
(which I'm not at the moment, so these paranoid
delusions are entirely my own, and do not represent
any official stance of any corporate entity of any
sort), it's to run herd over several dozen different
networks, with many different org-IDs.  That would
effectively allow me to do 50 /16 transfers per
year with no justification needed, under different
names; in half a decade, that would allow me to
suck up a /8 with no justification needed.  And
$eventual_dayjob isn't even one of the really big
players; for the really big players, it would be
relatively straightforward to suck up a /8 per year
this way.

I remain unconvinced that removing needs-based
justification for transfers is a healthy notion for a
resource that is absolutely and finitely bounded,
and for which there are billion hostages around
the planet under the control of 3 entities.

I realize I'm paranoid; but that means it's
going to take a lot more confidence in this
marketplace to get me to the point where
I'd feel comfortable changing my vote.

Thanks!

Matt



>
> Regards,
> Mike
>
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