> at least in the ripe ncc service region, all this proved was that if the
> cost of registering a company (or LIR) and applying for an allocation
> was lower than the market rate of ipv4 addresses, then people would do that.

Funny you say that, I had the same discussion with someone yesterday. It wouldn't be hard from a PDP perspective to implement a policy that prohibits companies from the same corporate group from applying for allocations to ensure a fair distribution for new members, so for example if two LLCs had the same owners/directors (forgive the terminology) both LLCs could not both hold resources, it'd be one or the other.

Going back to allocation rates...

After looking at the APNIC Resource Explorer (https://rex.apnic.net/) since policy "prop-127: Change maximum delegation size of 103/8 IPv4 address pool to a /23" was implemented, there have been on average (the equivalent of) 1834 x /23 prefixes delegated per-year, from 09 May 2019 to 08 May 2024. I've averaged the future delegation rates from 09 January to 08 May based on the prior 8 months. Looking at the equivalent number of /23 prefixes in 3 x /8 prefixes, this calculates to quite a substantial 98,304 x /23 prefixes in 3 x /8 which would last ~50 years based on delegation rates in the APNIC region. Even if we were to reserve 10% of that pool, that would still give us a timeframe of about 48 years. Want to increase the maximum delegation to a /22 and retrospectively apply it to those who could only apply for a /23? Still gives us just under 22 years.

A substantial amount of time.

Regards,
Christopher Hawker

P.S. All the figures above are based on the 5 RIRs getting an equal distribution of 3 x /8 prefixes. LACNIC and AFRINIC may (as an example) only receive 1x or 2x /8 prefixes due to their service region sizes with the balance distributed between ARIN, RIPE NCC and APNIC. This again, would affect figures and is difficult to forecast.

On Sun, 14 Jan 2024 at 01:39, Nick Hilliard <nick@foobar.org> wrote:
Matthew Petach wrote on 13/01/2024 00:27:
> In light of that, I strongly suspect that a second go-around at
> developing more beneficial post-exhaustion policies might turn out
> very differently than it did when many of us were naively thinking
> we understood how people would behave in a post-exhaustion world.

Naah, any future relitigation would end up the same if new ipv4
addresses fell out of the sky and became available. The ipv4 address
market turned out exactly like most people suspected: it was a market;
people bought and sold addresses; the addresses cost money; there
were/are some sharks; life moved on.

> If you limit each requesting organization to a /22 per year, we can
> keep the internet mostly functional for decades to come,

at least in the ripe ncc service region, all this proved was that if the
cost of registering a company (or LIR) and applying for an allocation
was lower than the market rate of ipv4 addresses, then people would do that.

The root problem is unavoidable: ipv4 is a scarce resource with an
inherent demand. Every policy designed to mitigate against this will
create workarounds, and the more valuable the resource, the more
inventive the workaround.

In terms of hard landings vs soft landings, what will make ipv6 succeed
is how compelling ipv6 is, rather than whether someone created a policy
to make ipv4 less palatable. In particular, any effect from a hard
landing compared would have been ephemeral.

Nick