Joe, On Feb 19, 2008, at 4:28 AM, Joe Maimon wrote:
When IANA free pool exhaustion happens or even appears to be imminent, one can expect push for allocation policies to be changed drastically towards the miserly.
No. You might see a push towards this, but it will take far longer to get policies modified than there will be time left and there will be increased 'competition' among the RIRs that will strongly discourage this course of action (as someone who has proposed a policy that would impose more restrictions on v4 allocations, I have already heard the "if we modify our policies to be more conservative, then the folks in other RIRs will get an advantage" several times). The RIR bureaucracy is a ponderous ship that turns very slowly and has multiple captains who do not necessarily agree on the direction to turn. IPv4 allocation policy revisions aren't going to save us.
Furthermore, I expect more credence will be lent to the reclaiming efforts, and pre-RIR swamp space has lots of candidates.
What incentive to a holder of early allocations is there to return address space voluntarily?
Class-E,
Efforts to redefine class E have stalled because there is simply no way it can be used for anything other than private space. There are too many implementations out there that will never be modified (e.g., Windows 98) on which you can't even configure class E space.
rfc3330 and similar reclamation might occur as well.
IANA recently reclaimed 14/8. I think that added 3 _weeks_ to the expected runout date. That was likely the last "easily" reclaimable block.
The question is how ARIN will deal with the market after the IPv4 free pool exhausts. I expect the value will skyrocket, whether on the black, grey or white market.
Yep. And the question is: as an ISP or other address consuming organization, what will you do when the cost of obtaining IPv4 addresses skyrockets? So far, as far as I can tell, the answer to that question (in most cases) has been putting hands over ears and saying "La la la" loudly. See <http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/020608-ipv4-address-depletion.html
.
Regards, -drc