What an embarrassing failure of economic reasoning.
IPv4 addresses are a scare resource. Acknowledging that, and allowing them to be traded at a price that reflects their value, is the surest way to get them out of the hands of those who are wasting them in the way tptacek and the article describe and into the hands of those who will do something more productive with them. Pricing IPv4 addresses would hasten adoption of IPv6 by providing a financial incentive to switch from IPv4 to IPv6 to those who can do so most easily (i.e., cheaply).
In other words, if you want to "get around this mess", stop allocating scarce and valuable IPv4 addresses as if they have no value.
But (and someone correct me if I'm wrong), but individual IP addresses are not a commodity. If you broke apart that /8 and auctioned them off, if would be a routing nightmare.
Smallest prefix that can be meaningfully used is /24 (you cannot advertise smaller prefix), but I think that everyone advertising random /24s would lead to even larger costs for router upgrades than IPv6.
I think there are still bigger than /24s where /24 announcements aren't allowed. People filtered for a while (at least around 2000-2002) in those ranges, so you couldn't just take a random swamp /16 and turn it into a bunch of /24s and expect them to be visible to everyone, although it did work to most. I haven't paid much attention to routing politics for the past 5 years or so though.
> What an embarrassing failure of economic reasoning.
1. IPv4 addresses are overdemanded and undersupplied.
2. IPv6 addresses are practically limitless and will serve the same purpose once we switch over.
3. We should switch to IPv6 ASAP.
Where's the economic flaw?
(Also, it should be pointed out that allowing trades on IPv4 would not decrease availability, it would only increase it: Right now, you can't switch the owner of /x blocks without IANNA approval, so right now you have no choice but to push for switching to v6, whereas with trading you could waste money on v4 instead. Moreover, this would encourage the companies with the most money to buy IPv4 blocks rather than invest in switching over to v6, which would slow down the process for everyone since they're the biggest companies. TLDR -- force investment in IPv6 not IPv4. There's also a fairness issue since these IPv4 blocks were originally allocated for free -- should MIT be able to make billions on their block?)
Not any more. Within the ARIN region it's legal to straight-up sell addresses as long as the buyer is actually going to use them (people argue about this point a lot but it doesn't seem like a big deal IMO).
Actually no, IP addresses are not a resource. They're not limited at all, except by convenience which was chosen at a time when they had to chose a limit and it was not practical to set it any higher. All that is needed is to make a new standard which allows for a higher practical limit -- and that's what we're doing with IPv6.
So I?v4 addresses only seem valuable in this moment, because so many of them have been distributed -- bvut something that can be added in unlimited quantities (like a number) is inherently not valuable.
Do you remember when DOS and Windows file names could only contain eight plus three letters? Was the solution to proclaim file names valuable and charge extra for adding new combinations? Or simply to develop a new platform which allowed for longer names?
What you've done here is generalized the concept out so far that we can't discuss it. We're not talking about a fuzzy concept of "addresses"; we're talking specifically about IPv4 RIB entries.
IPv4 addresses are a scare resource. Acknowledging that, and allowing them to be traded at a price that reflects their value, is the surest way to get them out of the hands of those who are wasting them in the way tptacek and the article describe and into the hands of those who will do something more productive with them. Pricing IPv4 addresses would hasten adoption of IPv6 by providing a financial incentive to switch from IPv4 to IPv6 to those who can do so most easily (i.e., cheaply).
In other words, if you want to "get around this mess", stop allocating scarce and valuable IPv4 addresses as if they have no value.