The debate there will be around the preferential treatment that larger ARIN members get (in terms of larger allocations, lower per address fees, etc), which Kremen construes as being anticompetitive via creating artificial barriers to entry. That may end up being changed.

Your statement about preferential treatment is factually incorrect. Larger ARIN members do not get larger allocations. It is the larger network infrastructures that get the larger allocations which is not directly tied to the size of the company. Yes, larger companies often have larger infrastructures. However, ARIN gives the addresses based primarily on the number of hosts attached to the network infrastructure. It has been argued in the past that ARIN's policies are prejudiced AGAINST larger organizations because the rules do not properly allow for the scaling overhead necessary due to the complexity of larger networks. As for fees, there are no per-address fees and there never have been. When we created ARIN, we paid special attention to this point because we did not want to create the erroneous impression that people were "buying" IP addresses. The fees are related to the amount of effort required to service an organization and that is not directly connected to the number of addresses. --Michael Dillon (no longer in any official ARIN capacity. Just another member)

On Sep 8, 2006, at 10:33 AM, Stephen Sprunk wrote:

Thus spake <Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com>

...

[ I said ]

...

The debate there will be around the preferential treatment that larger ARIN members get (in terms of larger allocations, lower per address fees, etc), which Kremen construes as being anticompetitive via creating artificial barriers to entry. That may end up being changed.

Your statement about preferential treatment is factually incorrect. Larger ARIN members do not get larger allocations. It is the larger network infrastructures that get the larger allocations which is not directly tied to the size of the company. Yes, larger companies often have larger infrastructures.

And that's the point: A company that is established gets preferential treatment over one that is not; that is called a barrier to entry by the anti-trust crowd. You may feel that such a barrier is justified and fair, but those on the other side of it (or more importantly, their lawyers) are likely to disagree.

...

As for fees, there are no per-address fees and there never have been. When we created ARIN, we paid special attention to this point because we did not want to create the erroneous impression that people were "buying" IP addresses. The fees are related to the amount of effort required to service an organization and that is not directly connected to the number of addresses.

Of course it's directly connected; all you have to do is look at the current fee schedule and you'll see:

/24 = $4.88/IP /23 = $2.44/IP /22 = $1.22/IP /21 = $0.61/IP /20 = $0.55/IP /19 = $0.27/IP /18 = $0.27/IP /17 = $0.137/IP /16 = $0.069/IP /15 = $0.069/IP /14 = $0.034/IP

While the price points quoted may be accurate, they don't really reflect the pricing tiers in use at ARIN and I notice you completely ignore the fact that no matter how much more than a /14 you have, you pay $18,000 and additional allocations don't really cost anything. Further, the prices you suggest refer to registration fees for ISPs, but, the current fee schedule if you are NOT an ISP is a bit different (end user subscriber): /24 = $100/year /23 = $100/year /22 = $100/year /21 = $100/year ... /8 = $100/year etc.

So, just between the two ends of the fee schedule, we have a difference of _two orders of magnitude_ in how much an registrant pays divided by how much address space they get. Smaller folks may use this to say that larger ISPs, some of whose employees sit on the ARIN BOT/AC, are using ARIN to make it difficult for competitors to enter the market.

Since you are paying for registration services and not for the IPs themselves, that is perfectly reasonable. End users registration needs are simple, thus, the $100/year flat fee. ISPs do some volume of sub-assignment registration and as a result, the larger the network, the more registration effort involved. However, the effort does not scale linearly with the address space and the fee structure reflects this.

Since that argument appears to be true _on the surface_, ARIN will need to show how servicing smaller ISPs incurs higher costs per address and thus the lower fees for "large" allocations are simply passing along the savings from economy of scale. Doable, but I wouldn't want to be responsible for coming up with that proof.

I don't even think it is all that difficult. Especially given the end-user fees.

Besides the above, Kremen also points out that larger prefixes are more likely to be routed, therefore refusing to grant larger prefixes (which aren't justified, in ARIN's view) is another barrier to entry. Again, since the folks deciding these policies are, by and large, folks who are already major players in the market, it's easy to put an anticometitive slant on that.

It is my experience that any prefix within ARIN policy is generally equally routable. I would say that in my experience, Kremen's assertion in this area is false. Additionally, the characterization of the ARIN policy process is largely detached from reality. While the BoT technically has final and complete authority, I cannot recall a situation in which a policy with consensus was not accepted by the board, nor can I recall a situation where the board adopted a policy without consensus. Since the public policy meetings and mailing lists where consensus is judged are open to any interested party, it is very hard to view this as an anti-competitive act in my opinion. Owen

...

Your statement about preferential treatment is factually incorrect. Larger ARIN members do not get larger allocations. It is the larger network infrastructures that get the larger allocations which is not directly tied to the size of the company. Yes, larger companies often have larger infrastructures.

And that's the point: A company that is established gets preferential treatment over one that is not; that is called a barrier to entry by the

anti-trust crowd.

You need to understand the basics of networking to see that this is NOT preferential treatment but is instead even-handed treatment. You see, a network is a collection of devices interconnected with circuits. Each point where a circuit connects to a device is called an interface. Devices may have more than one interface. Typically, the devices used by network operators have many interfaces. IP addresses are numbers used to uniquely identify such interfaces and the Internet Protocol (IP) requires that these numbers be assigned in a structured manner. It is then obvious that larger networks have more interfaces and therefore can TECHNICALLY justify more addresses. This is even-handed treatment even though small companies end up with less addresses than large companies.

You may feel that such a barrier is justified and fair, but those on the other side of it (or more importantly, their lawyers) are likely to disagree.

Yes, lawyers do not understand networks. No doubt some of them will read the above text and begin to get a glimmer of understanding.

Of course it's directly connected; all you have to do is look at the current fee schedule and you'll see:

/24 = $4.88/IP /23 = $2.44/IP

That is completely untrue. ARIN's web page here http://www.arin.net/billing/fee_schedule.html says nothing of the sort. In fact, ARIN's annual fees are structure so that organizations which have a larger transaction volume pay a larger fee. These transactions could be IP address applications or SWIP transactions or in-addr.arpa traffic. The size categories are just a rough rule of thumb for categorizing organizations that has been accepted by the ARIN members themselves.

So, just between the two ends of the fee schedule, we have a difference of _two orders of magnitude_ in how much an registrant pays divided by how much address space they get.

Large organizations get their allocations bit by bit, applying for 3-6 months requirements at a time. Small organizations may have only a single allocation.

Besides the above, Kremen also points out that larger prefixes are more likely to be routed, therefore refusing to grant larger prefixes (which aren't justified, in ARIN's view) is another barrier to entry. Again, since the folks deciding these policies are, by and large, folks who are

already major players in the market, it's easy to put an anticometitive slant on that.

Routability decisions are not made by ARIN. If anyone is unhappy with routability they should be suing those organizations which recommend route filtering. But they would have to prove that the route filtering is not technically justified which will be difficult when all the expert witnesses are on the other side. --Michael Dillon

On Fri, 8 Sep 2006, Gordon Cook wrote:

This is Gary Kremen owner of SEX dot com.

cohen stole sex.com from kremen and kremen sued and got it back - it looks like he is trying to force arin to give him cohen's IP assignments sounds like a grudge match - but it is a shame that he might do arin collateral damage

Yes, at the least, wasting huge piles of ARIN's money on legal fees; which is likely Kremen's entire intent, to "teach them a lesson" for not handing over what he wanted. People who use the courts as a way to bleed their targets like this are vermin. Not surprising at all that this is all about some domain-squatting nonsense. I do hope that ARIN can convince the judge to issue a summary judgement to throw this entire case out. matto --matt@snark.net------------------------------------------<darwin>< Moral indignation is a technique to endow the idiot with dignity. - Marshall McLuhan

Matt Ghali wrote:

Yes, at the least, wasting huge piles of ARIN's money on legal fees; which is likely Kremen's entire intent, to "teach them a lesson" for not handing over what he wanted.

Correction. Wasting huge piles of our money. I was hoping the money would go towards a new template, too! -Jack

Jon Lewis wrote:

In small quantities, and which tie you to particular providers. Shells of companies have been bought (or just claimed) for their large, especially pre-ARIN, PI-IP assignments. To a young ISP, a /16 for example may seem like a lifetime supply of IP space, and save the company many thousands of dollars (ARIN registration fees) and paperwork hassles.

Actually, their issue is that ARIN would only transfer the netblock to them under the condition of them signing the contract (which effectively states that ARIN controls the netblocks). They would also be liable for the annual fees. They are trying to treat IP address space as property which they own, and refuse to agree to ARIN registration/fees to obtain what they feel is their property. Unfortunately, while ARIN is a steward and technically does not *own* the IP address space, neither does the ISP that uses the space. The defendant apparently misses the fact that IP space is a community asset and is thus handled by the community. IANAL, but I doubt they can prove Antitrust in this case. If only we could handle other limited resources in the world as effectively; including BGP routing table bloat. -Jack

Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com wrote:

But in the end, IP addresses are not property, therefore they cannot be assets and cannot be transferred. They can only be kept if they are in use on network assets which are transferred and which continue to be operational. And even then, most people have no choice as to which specific address block they use. They simply take what the ISP gives them.

One could probably debate that statement for a long time. Saying they are "free" to me is technically inaccurate. If you are getting PI space, you have to pay registration fees, which incurs cost on behalf of the party. A growing number of ISPs are now charging "leasing" fees or similar fees for the usage of PA addresses. As IP address scarcity goes up, I wouldn't be surprised if leasing fees become higher and/or if ARIN fees become more steep as an attempt to weed out people who are trying to horde address space. While IP addresses certainly are not a tangible asset, and a defined intrinsic value can not be determined, there does seem to be a value to them, if only speculative at best. Best Regards, -Michael -- Michael Nicks Network Engineer KanREN e: mtnicks@kanren.net o: +1-785-856-9800 x221 m: +1-913-378-6516

3) What's wrong with treating assignments like property and setting up a market to buy and sell them? There's plenty of precedent for this: Mineral rights, mining claims, Oil and gas leases, radio spectrum. If a given commodity is truly scarce, nothing works as good as the free market in encouraging consumers to conserve and make the best use of it. I think you're dead-on there, but you forget who you're really trying to convince. It'll happen eventually but in the meantime the greybeards who were largely responsible for the Internet as we know it (and who by and large still wield significant influence if not still stewardship) will be dragged there kicking and screaming from their academic/pseudo-Marxist ideals, some of whom seem to still resent the commercialization of the Internet. It's also hard to see the faults in the system when you are insulated by your position as member of the politburo. The flip side of the coin of course is that if you let the free market reign on IP's, you may price developing countries right off the Internet which I don't think anyone sees as a desirable outcome. There's sure to be a happy middle ground that people smarter than I will figure out, and maybe it takes a silly lawsuit such as this to kick things off. Andrew Cruse

...

...

3) What's wrong with treating assignments like property and setting up a market to buy and sell them? There's plenty of precedent for this:

...

...

Mineral rights, mining claims, Oil and gas leases, radio spectrum. If a given commodity is truly scarce, nothing works as good as the free market in encouraging consumers to conserve and make the best use of it.

I think you're dead-on there, but you forget who you're really trying to convince. It'll happen eventually but in the meantime the greybeards who were largely responsible for the Internet as we know it (and who by and large still wield significant influence if not still stewardship) will be dragged there kicking and screaming from their academic/pseudo-Marxist ideals, some of whom seem to still resent the commercialization of the Internet. It's also hard to see the faults in the system when you are insulated by your position as member of the politburo.

The flip side of the coin of course is that if you let the free market reign on IP's, you may price developing countries right off the Internet which I don't think anyone sees as a desirable outcome. There's sure to be a happy middle ground that people smarter than I will figure out, and maybe it takes a silly lawsuit such as this to kick things off.

Andrew Cruse

Another somewhat important point is that we also need to conserve routing entries. If you make a market for addresses without regard to routability, you risk creating a situation where you flood the world with /32's. No thanks.

Tony

I would think that would tend to police itself. Even now with things as they are you're going to have serious reachability problems if you try to announce anything smaller than a /24. And if routing tables suddenly explode, I'd expect that threshold to quickly move in reaction. Andrew Cruse

Hank Nussbacher wrote:

And the same way that government forced telephone number portability, I foresee one day government requiring IP number portability among ISPs in order to increase competition. So all those SWIPS and PA assignments in ARIN/RIPE/APNIc may one day be used to allow Acme Nail with their /29 assignment to leave ISP A and move to ISP B. Legislators have been known to make more idiotic laws and regulations so don't think it couldn't happen.

Customers already have portability. It's called DNS. IP addresses aren't published in the big web rolodexes. They don't need their IP address to stay with them. pt

3) What's wrong with treating assignments like property and setting up a market to buy and sell them? There's plenty of precedent for this:

Mineral rights, mining claims, Oil and gas leases, radio spectrum.

Before you start making inferences from an analogy, you had better be sure that you have the right analogy. IP addresses are not like any of the things that you mention. They are like phone numbers which also are not property and also managed by a central admin function NANPA. --Michael Dillon

Nick, You make an incorrect assumption - that IP addresses are currently free (they are not, in either money or time) and that commoditizing them will increase their cost (there is significant evidence it will not). If I have the choice between paying $500 for a /24 of PI space or going to my upstreams, getting IP space, applying to ARIN for a /22 of PI space, eventually numbering out of the PA space - how much money have I spent? - Daniel Golding

-----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On Behalf Of Michael Nicks Sent: Friday, September 08, 2006 2:19 PM To: andrew2@one.net Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: [Fwd: Kremen VS Arin Antitrust Lawsuit - Anyone have feedback?]

The real fundamental flaw with this free-market approach to handling IP assignments is the fact that it will further create an environment where smaller (start-ups, small businesses) entities trying to acquire PI space will face insurmountable challenges (eg, financial).

While I think the majority of people these days would agree that the free-market approach to economics is definitely the best, certain resources are not very applicable to be traded in a free-market environment. I myself do not like over-bureaucratic processes, and while all of us at one time or another have complained about ARIN's procedures, policies, and practices, the purpose they serve is a needed one.

Best Regards, -Michael

-- Michael Nicks Network Engineer KanREN e: mtnicks@kanren.net o: +1-785-856-9800 x221 m: +1-913-378-6516

andrew2@one.net wrote:

...

3) What's wrong with treating assignments like property and setting up a market to buy and sell them? There's plenty of precedent for this:

Mineral rights, mining claims, Oil and gas leases, radio spectrum.

If a given commodity is truly scarce, nothing works as good as the free market in encouraging consumers to conserve and make the best use of it.

I think you're dead-on there, but you forget who you're really trying to convince. It'll happen eventually but in the meantime the greybeards who were largely responsible for the Internet as we know it (and who by and large still wield significant influence if not still stewardship) will be dragged there kicking and screaming from their academic/pseudo-Marxist ideals, some of whom seem to still resent the commercialization of the Internet. It's also hard to see the faults in the system when you are insulated by your position as member of the politburo.

The flip side of the coin of course is that if you let the free market reign on IP's, you may price developing countries right off the Internet which I don't think anyone sees as a desirable outcome. There's sure to be a happy middle ground that people smarter than I will figure out, and maybe it takes a silly lawsuit such as this to kick things off.

Andrew Cruse

Michael, On Sep 12, 2006, at 2:11 AM, Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com wrote:

Since IP addresses are tightly tied to the network architecture, how can they ever be liquid?

How are PI addresses tightly tied to network architecture? Rgds, -drc

On Sep 13, 2006, at 1:37 AM, Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com wrote:

...

...

Since IP addresses are tightly tied to the network architecture, how can they ever be liquid? How are PI addresses tightly tied to network architecture? What percentage of the total IPv4 address space is PI?

Good question. Perhaps someone from the RIRs could provide this information. What also might be interesting is the rate of change for PI allocations. My suspicion is the rate of PI allocations is increasing. Perhaps more interesting would be percentage and rate of change of PI IPv6 given scarcity isn't (yet?) an issue with IPv6.

If non-PI addresses are not property then how do PI addresses gain that attribute?

I suspect your position on whether or not PI addresses are property depends on whether it is "yours" or not. Rgds, -drc

Erm, Uranium *is* a commodity. Last week's spot price was $52 a pound for U3O8. It's a small market in terms of numbers of players but it's still an open market in the economic sense. 102 million pounds were traded in 2004. Hedge funds are players in the uranium market (source: www.uxc.com, home page)

I don't know where you got that figure but the website you reference states that in 2005 only 35 million pounds were traded in 107 transaction. I think most people will agree that any item for which only 107 transactions are concluded in a year is not terribly liquid. According to this http://www.cbot.com/cbot/pub/cont_detail/0,3206,1248+21215,00.html in Chicago alone, counting only trades for 100 oz. unit size, there were 15,544 contracts. Add to that the fact that you can buy and sell gold in any major bank in any major city as well as in most large jewellry stores and you have a very liquid commodity indeed. --Michael Dillon

On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 02:45:58PM -0400, Daniel Golding wrote:

Joe makes a good point. Everyone is shouting "no one owns IP addresses", but that is proof by assertion.

...as is asserting that marketplace economics work for any and all things. I lean toward low-regulation myself - why would I want any regional governmental entity sticking its fingers into a process that is 100% open to its constituents? If anything, the free market of *ideas* is working quite well for the policy arena, with less up-front cost and complexity.

There is a strong argument to be made for ownership of IP addressing and subsequently trading address space as a commodity, with ARIN as a commodity exchange and clearinghouse.

Is this reaction people hating lawyers more than ARIN, or what?

It is funny for a free-marketeer to go down the road of wanting to create more regulation: financial markets/trading floors are one of the models that require a non-trivial support structure in mechanics, legislation and regulation. Sure all that activity might employ more folks (mostly inside the beltway), but will we be better off in the end? On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 02:50:04PM -0400, Daniel Golding wrote: [snip]

You make an incorrect assumption - that IP addresses are currently free (they are not, in either money or time) and that commoditizing them will increase their cost (there is significant evidence it will not).

Who here is invoking proof by assertion? 'Evidence' implies something concrete. At present, the currency in the above-board IP addressing market are tied to clues rather than dollars. Those with clues (by bothering to read the specs, hiring permanently, or renting them) sail through the process while those without get frustrated. Because some folks with more dollars than clues get frustrated at applying decades-old technology of indirection through DNS labels, why change the infrastructure to let the dollars win over the clues? If they can't read the instructions to unbolt their training wheels should they even be operating infrastructure? I'd suggest that the ARIN public policy and any related flights of armchair-economist musings would be best suited to the ARIN ppml list. ...though I suspect the topic will occupy some of us at dinner tongiht. :-) Cheers, Joe -- RSUC / GweepNet / Spunk / FnB / Usenix / SAGE

On Sep 12, 2006, at 4:22 PM, Fred Baker wrote:

IP Addresses have always been treated as a resource of the network since its inception. The fact that lawmakers don't understand or care to understand doesn't change the facts of the case.

I'm sure the same argument was used for telephone numbers when technical folk were arguing against number portability. Rgds, -drc

On Wed, 13 Sep 2006 05:37:05 -0700 David Conrad <drc@virtualized.org> wrote:

I'm sure the same argument was used for telephone numbers when technical folk were arguing against number portability.

Oh come on. You know perfectly well that phone numbers are not the same as IP. No one knows me by my IP address. They know me by my email address(es). Heck, even I don't know my own IP address without running ifconfig and I installed it and maintain the system. If we were still calling central and asking "Hi Mabel, can you put me through to Doc," no one would give a rat's ass about phone number portability. Notice that no one is getting worked up about circuit number portability. -- D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy@druid.net> | Democracy is three wolves http://www.druid.net/darcy/ | and a sheep voting on +1 416 425 1212 (DoD#0082) (eNTP) | what's for dinner.

On Wed, 13 Sep 2006 17:53:04 +0200 Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer@nic.fr> wrote:

On Wed, Sep 13, 2006 at 11:43:36AM -0400, D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy@druid.net> wrote a message of 20 lines which said:

...

No one knows me by my IP address. They know me by my email address(es).

Huh? Are you trying to imply something? If your email software automatically adds that statement then please fix it. It's insulting when you trim the message to a shorter statement that you are responding to. The other 18 lines may not have been important to this particular response but they were not content free.

It does not seem true. IP addresses are visible outside in:

* DNS servers when you get a zone delegation (the most important reason why changing IP addresses is a pain),

I reiterate, no one knows me by my IP address. The software (DNS) they use may and some people may need to make a change but the world in general does not need to know that. That's the whole point of DNS. My point is that my friends and aquaintences may remember my number or have it in their Rolodex but no one has to remember my IP address and very few ever have to even deal with it at all and those that do, only for a moment. OK, my real point is that phone numbers are not like IP addresses. You may find a dark corner that exhibits some similarity but the basic analogy is flawed.

* some peer-to-peer networks like Freenet, which do not use the DNS.

I don't know enough about Freenet but I am willing to bet that users don't need to remember IP addresses to get the benefits of it.

(There are also a lof of internal uses of IP addresses for instance in firewalls and SSH caches.)

I never said that IP addresses were never used anywhere. That would be ridiculous. They are entered into firewalls, routers, DNS servers and such. What I said was that users (remember them) don't have to memorize or track them.

So, you actually have:

1) Phone numbers (very visible outside) 2) IP addresses (visible outside) 3) MAC addresses (completely invisible outside except for a few minutes in the ARP caches)

Even number 3 does not leak out of the local area. However, I fail to see what conclusion you wish me to draw from this. I don't know anyone with any modicum of understanding of IP protocols that would dispute these statements other than my nit about number 3. -- D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy@druid.net> | Democracy is three wolves http://www.druid.net/darcy/ | and a sheep voting on +1 416 425 1212 (DoD#0082) (eNTP) | what's for dinner.

On Wed, 13 Sep 2006 10:38:49 -0700 Clay Fiske <clay@bloomcounty.org> wrote:

On Wed, Sep 13, 2006 at 12:17:59PM -0400, D'Arcy J.M. Cain wrote:

...

I reiterate, no one knows me by my IP address. The software (DNS) they use may and some people may need to make a change but the world in general does not need to know that. That's the whole point of DNS.

Let me adjust that for you:

No thanks.

---- I reiterate, no one knows me by my phone number. The phone book they use may and some people may need to make a change but the world in general does not need to know that. That's the whole point of the phone book. ----

I know many of my friends phone numbers by heart. I also know many businesses by their phone number. There is a popular pizza chain here that uses their phone number in their jingle. Just last night I noticed a vet across the street from a bar I was in who's phone number was 481-PETS. I would have no need to look that up in any book. There are many cases when we have to look up numbers but numbers is what we need in the end to phone someone. This is a weakness, one that the architects of the Internet fixed by introducing domains. Domains are what we have to remember, store in our rolodexes and look up in Internet "phone books."

...

My point is that my friends and aquaintences may remember my number or have it in their Rolodex but no one has to remember my IP address and very few ever have to even deal with it at all and those that do, only for a moment.

Some people may know your phone number off the top of their heads, but most will have to look it up. The main difference I see is that there is a dynamic system for looking up IP addresses, so changes are easier

If we know the domain which is the thing that users are required to remember. I deal with a music store called Long & McQuade here in Toronto. The first few times I wanted to check out their web site I looked them up in the phone book (a.k.a. "Google") but eventually I learned to remember Long-McQuade.com. I still can't remember their phone number. I generally go to the web site to get it.

to propagate. The Rolodex is the equivalent of a hosts file. The phone book roughly equates to mailing out a zone file periodically. Calling 411 is probably about as close to DNS as the phone system gets.

No, calling 411 is closer to hitting Google. I don't call 411 to get the BTN or circuit number.

We have phone numbers so the network knows where to send the call, not because they are convenient for people to remember.

The phone number system doesn't scale well. Too late to fix it now.

...

OK, my real point is that phone numbers are not like IP addresses. You may find a dark corner that exhibits some similarity but the basic analogy is flawed.

They may not be identical, but I think the analogy works well. In both cases the numeric address is used to route to a destination device. In both cases, we have a reference system to resolve a name to said address.

I'm beginning to think I am feeding the troll here. I am sure that 99.9% of the people on this list understand that phone numbers are more analogous to domains than to IP addresses. Yes, it's a flawed analogy but less flawed than the other. I think I am done with this particular "my analogy is bigger than your analogy" war. Oops. Did I just make another analogy? :-) -- D'Arcy J.M. Cain <darcy@druid.net> | Democracy is three wolves http://www.druid.net/darcy/ | and a sheep voting on +1 416 425 1212 (DoD#0082) (eNTP) | what's for dinner.

It's insulting when you trim the message to a shorter statement that you are responding to. The other 18 lines may not have been important to this particular response but they were not content free.

If your content was in any way, interesting, then people will have read it in the message that you posted. I see no need to repeat a bunch of irrelevant text when I am only replying to one point in your email. Personally, I wish more people would trim away all the irrelevant junk when replying. On the other hand, in the corporate world I find that the habit of top posting is very useful to me. I often see things that were never intended to be sent to me and I often discover that the previous replies in a thread betray the fact that the writer did not read or did not understand the original message. But on a mailing list, trimmed replies are superior. --Michael Dillon P.S. are the standards of this list so unclear that Darcy and I have to discuss this? Who is right?

On Wed, 13 Sep 2006, Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com wrote:

...

It's insulting when you trim the message to a shorter statement that you are responding to. The other 18 lines may not have been important to this particular response but they were not content free.

If your content was in any way, interesting, then people will have read it in the message that you posted. I see no need to repeat a bunch of irrelevant text when I am only replying to one point in your email.

Personally, I wish more people would trim away all the irrelevant junk when replying.

I'm not singling any one person out, but when a thread that started off talking about RIR policy issues and IP address portability debate gets this far off track, then it's time for that thread to die or be taken out-of-band. Agreed? jms

Le 2006-09-13 à 11:43, D'Arcy J.M. Cain a écrit :

Notice that no one is getting worked up about circuit number portability.

I don't know about that. I have always harboured a desire to visit ZOWISAP0001 in person. I hear Zoowie Island is quite lovely at this time of year. This is not a serious comment. I am just being CLLI. Joe

--- David Conrad <drc@virtualized.org> wrote:

I have been told on numerous occasions that one of the reasons IPv6 has not seen significant deployment is because enterprises do not want to obtain their address space from their service provider due to (among other reasons) the cost of renumbering.

The reasons I have been told by enterprises regarding lack of IPv6 deployment boil down to 1) lack of business driver (i.e. does it make money?) and 2) many/most medium-large enterprises neither qualify for PI addressing nor would be able to multihome using PA addressing. Issue #2 is being worked on now, but until a policy is securely in place, an enterprise adopting IPv6 is giving up capabilities they have today with IPv4.

Are you indicating you believe that renumbering is not an issue?

Renumbering is not THE issue. Renumbering sucks. However, there are policies in place to make it so that renumbering doesn't have to happen too much. Also, once renumbering is at the "really unpleasant" point, that's when an organization generally qualifies for PI space. Renumbering IP space is no different than renumbering postal addresses - the time spent to do so varies directly with the size of the organization, but it doesn't have to be done often. BTW, the telephone analogy folks have been missing here is that of the 8xx system, where the numbers themselves are leased due to intrinsic value, and then redirected to a different inbound trunk/call center/whatever. The 8xx system is the one which maps to domain names, not the standard land-line system. Note that 8xx numbers are not purchased, they are leased, as they consume resources - if 1-800-FLOWERS didn't pay their bill for a while, their whole business would vanish. Perhaps a customer who wanted to make IP addresses "portable" would pay a fee to the ISP whose addresses they are, and maintain redirection equipment to the "real" IPs... And perhaps the price of doing so would actually be higher than just keeping a T1 to that first provider... -David David Barak Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise: http://www.listentothefranchise.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

It's update your IPv6 filters time: http://www.arin.net/reference/ip_blocks.html 8<----------------------------------------- IPv6 Assignment Blocks CIDR Block 2620:0000:/23 ----------------------------------------->8 Expect blocks in between /40 and /48 there. That is enough space for best-case 2^(40-23) = 131.072 routes, worst case 2^(48-23) = 33.554.432 extra routes in your routing table, I hope Vendor C can handle it by the time that happens. In order words: better start saving up those bonus points, you will be buying quite a lot of new gear if this ever comes off the ground ;) Most likely case is a bit more optimistic if one takes /44's: 2.097.152 Still a lot more than the IPv4 routing table is now. It will take time, and possibly a lot, but it could just happen... On NANOG Roland Dobbins wrote: [..sarcasm mode..]

turning every host on the network into a router via a Shim-6-like mechanism isn't, either

If you would follow shim6 then you would notice that there is also an option for doing it side-wide. But I guess Vendor C doesn't like that option as then they can't sell bigger fatter routers ;)

(can you imagine help-desks who can barely cope with basic Windows issues trying to support Shim-6, heh?).

Ever tried to ask a help-desk if they knew what IPv4, BGP, ASN or any other simple term was? ;) Most times they don't even know what 'traceroute' means. [..]

Vendors, network operators and those participating in standards bodies must understand the seriousness of these issues for customers and work to address them (pardon the pun, heh).

Indeed a certain Vendor C should really start working on fixing a lot of bugs quickly. Greets, Jeroen

Stephen Sprunk wrote:

Thus spake "Jeroen Massar" <jeroen@unfix.org>

...

8<----------------------------------------- IPv6 Assignment Blocks CIDR Block 2620:0000:/23 ----------------------------------------->8 Expect blocks in between /40 and /48 there.

Expect mostly /48s and /44s, given that ARIN has not defined any criteria for what justifies more than a /48.

The first three are already available: 2620::/48 - U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission 2620:0:10:/48 - S. D. Warren Services Co. 2620:0:20:/48 - CollabNet These have been added to GRH (http://www.sixxs.net/tools/grh/) now lets see how long it takes for them to show up in the global tables and how far their reach will be. Hallway talk: one of them was requested 6 sept, answer on the same day that it will be issued, received on 13 sept, nice work there ARIN :)

Of course, some folks will announce a /44 instead since the block is reserved, but it should still only be one route.

That it is reserved as a /44 doesn't mean one can announce that /48 as it is not assigned to them.

Still, even if every org that qualified for an assignment today got one, you're still only looking at a couple tens of thousands of routes max. ARIN using a /23 for PIv6 is either serious overkill or "we'll never need to allocate another block" at work.

The /23 is a good thing indeed, people won't most likely have to ever update their filters for that one. [..]

IMHO, BGP will fall over and die long before we get to that many ASNs.

I guess that will indeed be the case.

Remember, the goal in giving people really big v6 blocks, vs. IPv4-style multiple allocations/assignments, is to reduce the necessary number of routes to (roughly) the number of ASNs.

But people require Traffic Engineering, as such they might want to do some routing tricks and thus split up their /48. Only the future will tell.

If PIv6 folks start announcing absurd numbers of routes within their allocation, I'd expect ISPs to start filtering everything longer than /48 -- if they don't do so from the start.

Most ISP's already do this now. In effect /19 - /48 is unfiltered in most places. Greets, Jeroen PS: Anybody knows when ARIN will finally learn CIDR? :) 8<----------------------------------- $ whois -h whois.arin.net 2620::/48 CIDR queries are not accepted No match found for 2620::/48. -------------------------------->8 They clearly understand it is CIDR and the resulting record even has a CIDR field; they really should move to the RPSL based db that RIPE provides.

On Wed, 13 Sep 2006, kloch wrote:

http://www.arin.net/registration/templates/v6-end-user.txt

An org that already has IPv4 space from ARIN will find it trivial to complete.

I wonder how well this would apply to orgs with pre-ARIN allocations, particularly smaller blocks. ...david --- david raistrick http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html drais@atlasta.net http://www.expita.com/nomime.html

The 8xx system is the one which maps to domain names, not the standard land-line system.

In the United States, due to number portability regulations, the standard land-line phone numbers also map to domain names because they are no longer used for routing calls. In the UK, mobile phone numbers also map to domain names because of regulations that allow you to switch mobile network operators and maintain your phone number.

Perhaps a customer who wanted to make IP addresses "portable" would pay a fee to the ISP whose addresses they are, and maintain redirection equipment to the "real" IPs... And perhaps the price of doing so would actually be higher than just keeping a T1 to that first provider...

There are people who are proposing a mechanism like that in order to do a new type of multihoming in IPv6. http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/multi6-charter.html --Michael Dillon