RE: Independent space from ARIN
On 4/14/2003 at 16:33:34 -0400, Brandon Ross said:
On Mon, 14 Apr 2003, Kris Foster wrote:
Was this tongue in cheek?
Nope.
I am not an economist, but this is a sure fire way to destroy the internet as we know it today.
Why is this so hard to believe? Real estate is mostly a free market, and that seems to perform pretty well for the most part. How is address space that different? Please explain how you believe this would destroy the internet.
There's a lot more available real estate than available v4 address space. That's the biggest one. Second, groups that make the Internet go aren't necessarily the ones who can afford the address space. Third, there's no root owner of the address space, so who is going to sell it? But really, you just need the first one: small space. The relatively small pool means that a large company with lots of money could buy the whole ARIN chunk of the Internet. Speculators would probably buy address space and leave it unused, much like they do for domain names. Address space would have to be bought and sold on arbitrary borders, resulting in massive fragmentation of the tables. On the good side, address-based lawsuits would revitalize our flagging litigous economy ;-) And I agree with what others are saying: It would kick IPv6 into high gear. I'm not sure that's a good thing, however. -Dave
Dave,
On 4/14/2003 at 16:33:34 -0400, Brandon Ross said:
On Mon, 14 Apr 2003, Kris Foster wrote:
Was this tongue in cheek?
Nope.
I am not an economist, but this is a sure fire way to destroy the interne
t
as we know it today.
Why is this so hard to believe? Real estate is mostly a free market, and that seems to perform pretty well for the most part. How is address space that different? Please explain how you believe this would destroy the internet.
There's a lot more available real estate than available v4 address space. That's the biggest one. Second, groups that make the Internet go aren't necessarily the ones who can afford the address space. Third, there's no root owner of the address space, so who is going to sell it?
But really, you just need the first one: small space. The relatively small pool means that a large company with lots of money could buy the whole ARIN chunk of the Internet. Speculators would probably buy address space and leave it unused, much like they do for domain names. Address space would have to be bought and sold on arbitrary borders, resulting in massive fragmentation of the tables.
On the good side, address-based lawsuits would revitalize our flagging litigous economy ;-)
(in a shameless self-promotion) there was a paper written a while ago by myself, Paul Resnick and Steve Bellovin on the topic of charging for IP addresses: Rekhter, Y., Resnick, P., Bellovin, S., "Financial Incentives for Route Aggregation and Efficient Address Utilization in the Internet", Coordination the Internet, MIT Press, 1997 Yakov.
And the buying and selling of intergers is complete hooey. One might as well buy bridges or swamp land in Florida. End of the day, its not addresses that are valuable, its the routing slots in the ISP routers. You know that and still persist in flogging this dead horse. :)
Why is this so hard to believe? Real estate is mostly a free market, and that seems to perform pretty well for the most part. How is address space that different? Please explain how you believe this would destroy the internet.
There's a lot more available real estate than available v4 address space. That's the biggest one. Second, groups that make the Internet go aren't necessarily the ones who can afford the address space. Third, there's no root owner of the address space, so who is going to sell it?
But really, you just need the first one: small space. The relatively small pool means that a large company with lots of money could buy the whole ARIN chunk of the Internet. Speculators would probably buy address space and leave it unused, much like they do for domain names. Address space would have to be bought and sold on arbitrary borders, resulting in massive fragmentation of the tables.
On the good side, address-based lawsuits would revitalize our flagging litigous economy ;-)
(in a shameless self-promotion) there was a paper written a while ago by myself, Paul Resnick and Steve Bellovin on the topic of charging for IP addresses:
Rekhter, Y., Resnick, P., Bellovin, S., "Financial Incentives for Route Aggregation and Efficient Address Utilization in the Internet", Coordination the Internet, MIT Press, 1997
Yakov.
On Mon, 14 Apr 2003, Dave Israel wrote:
There's a lot more available real estate than available v4 address space. That's the biggest one.
Is there? How much address space would be available if it were utilized efficiently by everyone? Once you put a price tag on it, organizations become the models of efficiency in utilization. If you can use NAT, you will, if you can't, you'll only assign unique addresses to users/applications that absolutly require it. If you don't like those options, maybe you'll move to v6. I just don't see a problem here.
Second, groups that make the Internet go aren't necessarily the ones who can afford the address space.
If they can't afford the address space, there's a very good chance it's because they are inefficient and they should be done away with. Besides, I just don't see address space being prohibitively expensive on an open market, as a previous poster pointed out, only a minority of address space is currently announced in the Internet. I'd bet at least half of that isn't used at all, and I'd bet another half of that is unnecessary.
Third, there's no root owner of the address space, so who is going to sell it?
I'll give you that, the initial sale is difficult. Perhaps the registries/IANA could use the proceeds to setup an annuity to fund address title registries/other IETF functions for the future.
But really, you just need the first one: small space. The relatively small pool means that a large company with lots of money could buy the whole ARIN chunk of the Internet.
There are a large number of organizations with more addres space than they need. The chances of any one company buying all the address space and then just sitting on it are nil. Why would their investors allow them to sit on a asset and not make any income on it? They would have to compete with the likes of GE, ATT, MIT, and Genuity for sales of the address space they already hold. -- Brandon Ross AIM: BrandonNR VP Operations ICQ: 2269442 Sockeye Networks
If they can't afford the address space, there's a very good chance it's because they are inefficient and they should be done away with.
capital != efficiency.
Besides, I just don't see address space being prohibitively expensive on an open market, as a previous poster pointed out, only a minority of address space is currently announced in the Internet. I'd bet at least half of that isn't used at all, and I'd bet another half of that is unnecessary.
it's not the amount of address space in use, the amount of space being announced, or even the amount of space that is "necessary" which matters. it's the ratio of the number of prefixes currently being announced to the number of prefixes, which were they to be announced, would cause lots of "disconnectivity". kind've hard to charge against the ratio, since no one body is in charge of anyone-in-particular's BGP tables. you can have all the address space you want if nobody is listening to your prefix announcements.
There are a large number of organizations with more addres space than they need. The chances of any one company buying all the address space and then just sitting on it are nil. Why would their investors allow them to sit on a asset and not make any income on it? They would have to compete with the likes of GE, ATT, MIT, and Genuity for sales of the address space they already hold.
you don't have to buy all of it to cause problems. just enough to be able to keep the price arbitrarily high. and in whose interest is it best to price small competitors out of the market? exactly those companies and/or individuals who would be able to do this. s.
participants (5)
-
bmanning＠karoshi.com -
Brandon Ross -
Dave Israel -
steve uurtamo -
Yakov Rekhter