[arin-ppml] Transparency on IPv4 transfers

[scott]

Hi Eliot,

On Sun, 17 Nov 2019, Eliot Lear wrote:

> Scott
> 
> I know this is OT, but…
>
>       On 28 Oct 2019, at 11:29, scott <scott at solarnetone.org> wrote:
> 
> Postel is presently rolling in his grave at such a rate that if we
> attach magnets to him and place inductors around him, we could
> produce the 1.21 gigawatts necessary to go back in time and prevent
> the monitization of IP addresses in the first place.
> 
> 
> Because address markets didn’t exist, it is speculative to comment about
> what Jon would have thought, and it is a bit cheeky to invoke his name in
> this way.  

Speculative?  Sure.  Should have prefaced with an IMHO.  Cheeky?  Yep, 
guilty as charged.  Shakes people out of their normal perspective, 
sometimes, which is why I use that cheekiness;)

My point is that what we have now, and what has been proposed about 
leasing of address space, is far from the notebook he used to keep address 
allocations sorted in.  How long will it be before the telecomization of 
v4 address space becomes a serious barrier to entry for new players?  It 
already has, IMHO.  The "gold rush" caused by open trading of address 
space, and the artificial scarcity that allows this, while profitable to a 
few, seem to me to be kind of a retrograde to progress.  Those opposed to 
wider v6 deployment, from my observation, seem to be those with a 
financial interest in keeping said artificial scarcity, or your random 
BOFH on a power trip.

Meanwhile, there are 3 billion or so people without connectivity at all, 
and hundreds of millions of others with insufficient access to perform 
modern tasks. This is often, in the US, in places where those making money 
off v4 have indicated sufficient service to the relevant regulatory 
agency.  Said regulatory agency does no independent due diligence, and 
just repeats the erroneous data.  Sure, more is required to connect the 
rest of the world than sufficient address space, but that is a rather 
critical component, IMHO.  Does this mean sunsetting v4?  Not today, not 
tomorrow.  Maybe never... it may continue as a historical museum type 
network in the world, but eventually, by means either de jure or de facto, 
functional sunsetting will occur out of needs of the market.  As a 
community, I think we need to be thinking about that as occuring in a 
reasonable time frame, no matter what we think that time frame will be. 
With v6 well deployed, the address shortage problems go away.

I remember connecting an island of 10000 people once.  3 IPv4 addresses
were available for the network.  Ever try to build a WISP and telecenters 
to introduce a marginalized populace to the Internet, and have to use NAT 
all over the place to do it?  Let me tell you, it's not pretty.  Now 
consider what it does to the education into Internet when you can't show 
them a properly numbered network in operation, but instead the fat kludge 
that NAT always has been and still is.

> I can only tell you that my experience was that Jon was a
> pragmatist and lived with the world as it was, as all good scientists do.

Sure, but as people of knowledge, we cannot afford to forget our ability, 
even responsibility, to shape the world.  As Whitman said, "that the 
powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse."

>  As a young idealistic brat, I was more of an architectural purist, and so
> I went head to head with him on the allocation of 10/8, and his response
> was classic: write an RFC that explains the problems, to advance the state
> of the art.  

Well, yeah, but these days, publishing an RFC is a significantly more 
involved endeavor, as you know.

> I dearly wish he could have lived to work on these issues with
> us.

Me too.

Scott

> 
> Eliot
> 
> Ps: I have no position on the proposed policy.
> 
>