Re: Fwd: Suggestion: charging for IPv4 space

Tom,

>> This "barrier to entry" argument seems bogus to me.  If I wanted  
>> to  start a farm a couple of centuries back, I could go out into  
>> the wilderness, kill off some flora and fauna, stake a claim, and  
>> start farming.  Today, I have to buy or lease land from existing  
>> land owners.  Does this mean that no new farms are established?
> The Rhodesians and the Zimbabweans, among others, would both  
> probably disagree with your factual claim, and with the policy  
> choices that it implies.


I actually don't think they would disagree (it's all about money,  
after all), but OK in such cases there are a couple more options on  
how to get the land to start a farm: government intervention or  
squatting.  The policy options we're looking at for a new IPv4 entrant  
appear roughly similar to me, you can:

a) buy or lease the address space from someone who has it;
b) convince a government (or RIR) to assert eminent domain and give  
the appropriated address space to you; or,
c) if you're big enough or have enough guns, squat on someone else's  
address space (which is just another form of (b)).

The point is that this "barrier to entry" is an expected outcome of  
any consumable finite resource and when this has occurred in the past,  
it has resulted in new entrants making adjustments to their business  
plans (usually, to have to find more startup capital to buy/lease/ 
bribe).  This may make it difficult or impossible to make the business  
case, just as it would hard to make the business case that I should  
start a farm in my neighborhood in Silicon Valley.  Maybe there are  
better ways I could spend my startup capital?

The reality is that exhaustion of the IPv4 free pool and the resulting  
increase in the cost of obtaining IPv4 addresses _will_ drive more  
efficient use of IPv4 (leading to increased innovation in areas like  
renumbering, (multi-layer) NAT, NAT traversal, etc.) and _may_  
increase desirability of IPv6 (leading to increased innovation in  
mechanisms to allow IPv6 to interoperate with IPv4 more  
transparently).  Since the exhaustion of the IPv4 free pool is  
inevitable, it would seem to me we should focus on coming up with  
policies that increase the likelihood of the desirable outcome (IPv6  
deployment) and decrease the likelihood of the less desirable outcome  
(does _anyone_ actually want multi-layer NAT?) instead of wasting time  
rearranging deck chairs in order to let theoretical new entrants hop  
on board the Titanic (even if it is the only ship in the  
neighborhood)...

Regards,
-drc

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