On Tue, 18 Jun 1996, Kent W. England wrote:
Let's just be very sure that if and when fees or prices for addresses are agreed, that someone doesn't step up and claim the right to auction addresses to cover the US budget deficit.
It might be useful for people who are concerned about this, to write down some scenarios that could develop if IP addresses were ever to become a marketable commodity. By doing this you may discover that although there is a worst-case scenario that is horrific, there is also a plausible scenario that is not really so bad. Some important factors to take into account when writing a scenario are the following: 1. IP addresses are not scarce. Someone recently posted some figures and I remember that only about 15% of the IPv4 space has been allocated. 2. IP addresses will not be scarce in the future. This is because IPv6 has a much larger address space and if IPv4 addresses seemed to be becoming scarce then that would be an impetus to deploy IPv6 faster. 3. RFC1918 private network addresses do exist along with a large variety of tools to allow most people to get the Internet access they need by sharing a proxy server that reuires but a single IP host address. 4. Many people get their Internet access via dialup to a provider who allocates them a dynamic address for the duration of their session. Thus, the total number of addresses needed is not clearly related to the number of hosts that require a connection. 5. Services that appear to require a static host address that is globally routable (talk and similar tools) may not actually need this. Already there is at least one example of a system whereby you register at a central server that is on the net. Whenever your site is available, it's IP address is given to this server and when someone wants to call you, they do it via this server. I think that all of the above would tend to depress the market value of IP addresses, probably to the point where it is simply not worth paying for them. Even if it were to be worth paying for them, I can't see a very high market value being possible. And if by some chance, the market value of IP addresses grew so high as to be an impediment to the growth of the Internet, there are technologies avaliable to the core providers (IPv6, IPv8, or something similar) that they could use to release customers from the IP address sharks. Michael Dillon ISP & Internet Consulting Memra Software Inc. Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com E-mail: michael@memra.com