So in what way exactly does the Internet as a whole benefit from allowing IPv4 addresses to be traded in a free market?
This is a honest question. I would like to know how we avoid ending up in a world where a few large companies control all the available IPv4 addresses (which they don't really need) so they can rent them to the rest of us at exhorbitant prices.
IPv6 won't render the problem moot - it's likely that IPv4 addresses will remain a necessity for globally reachable services for years to come, regardless of IPv6 adoption.
I always viewed the cause for slow IPv6 adoption as a lack of incentive - while IPv4 addresses are effectively free then where is the ROI in building an IPv6 infrastructure?
I guess that when IPv4 addresses are traded in a free market it is easier to realise the cost of not adopting IPv6, eventually leading to a faster adoption (which is a good thing for everyone, NAT is essentially making the internet a lot less cooler place than it could be).
Also, what would the alternative be? Just not handing out IPv4 blocks to new players and telling them "tough luck"? Or a lottery? I really don't know a better alternative to a free market.
IANA specifically states that a free-market of IP addresses would be harmful, instead they argue that IP allocation should be based on need and not treated as property.
>ISPs are required to utilize address space in an efficient manner. To this end, ISPs should have documented justification available for each assignment. The regional registry may, at any time, ask for this information. If the information is not available, future allocations may be impacted. In extreme cases, existing loans may be impacted. RFC 2050
Big companies have fought them on this and won.
>The court held that Nortel had an exclusive right to use the legacy numbers. The court also explicitly sanctioned Nortel’s exclusive right to transfer its exclusive right to use the numbers. In recognizing Nortel’s exclusive right to use legacy IPv4 numbers, the court implicitly found that Nortel had the exclusive right to possess the numbers themselves. Consequently, Nortel could exclude others from possession and use of the same legacy IPv4 numbers. In other words, the court found Nortel possessed the customary “bundle of rights” commonly associated with the ownership of tangible or intangible property. - Property Rights in IPv4 Numbers: Recognizing a New Form of Intellectual Property
The Coase theorem basically says that you can have any initial allocation of resources and so long as they are tradable, transaction costs are low, and a few other conditions are met, you will end up with an economically efficient outcome (i.e. those who will put the resources to the most remunerative use will end up with them).
Which isn't to say that any initial allocation will satisfy us as fair or that the outcome will satisfy us as fair, but a top down system may well end up being neither fair nor efficient.
The internet as a whole doesn't need to benefit; the buyer and seller do. The internet as a whole benefits from the liberty that lets us act without permission from central authorities.
Also, we're currently in a world where no large company owns even 1% of the addresses, and heading towards one where IPv6 is the majority of traffic. Have a look at http://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html and pretend to be an IPv4 address investor. The year-end figures are about 0.4, 1.0, 2.5 and 5.7%, so a little over 100% yearly growth for each of the past three years. If that goes on, we'll pass 50% IPv6 in 2017, and if that happens I rather doubt that IPv4 addresses will be worth much.
Of course that projection doesn't have to be right. Perhaps IPv6 growth slows down. But if you were an investor, would you invest heavily in v4 addresses on the assumption that IPv6 growth slows down? If so, why do you assume it'll slow down?
Oh, and I do think IPv6 will render IPv4 moot. Assuming that trading goes on, IPv4 will increasingly use tunnels and long-prefix routes, and then it'll have the kind of reliability problems v6 had around 2005.
So in what way exactly does the Internet as a whole benefit from allowing IPv4 addresses to be traded in a free market?
Compared to a world where you can't get IPs at any price? Seems pretty obvious: you can get IPs.
I would like to know how we avoid ending up in a world where a few large companies control all the available IPv4 addresses (which they don't really need) so they can rent them to the rest of us at exorbitant prices.
It seems like the cloud is already going there with only a few large providers. All I can suggest is to buy your IPs now before Amazon does.
This is actually the opposite of what I'm seeing in the American IPv4 market. I run a broker company (ipv4hub.com) with access to millions of IP addresses and can't sell any large blocks at all (large block being a /18 which is about 16,000 addresses).
The problem is that they designed IPv6 not to be backwards compatible with IPv4 in any meaningful way. Unless you forbid IPv4 traffic on the internet everyone is going to have to build all software for both for the foreseeable future. If everything works with both, why should you build against the new spec at all?
Given that worldwide Internet adoption is still growing strong, it is conceivable that sooner or later a significant number of endpoints will only have IPv6 connectivity, or that their IPv4 connectivity will be limited to a private address behind a carrier-grade NAT.
Another point to consider is that there are things you can do with IPv6 connectivity that are very difficult/costly, or outright impossible, in NATted IPv4 land.
Personally, I'm waiting for the next generation of peer-to-peer protocols that make use of end-to-end IPv6 connectivity instead of hole-punching and proxying through third-parties. (Case study: ever thought how ridiculous it is that in 2015 it's still non-trivial to send a large file to someone over the Internet without using some sort of storage service?)
It's plausible that one of those new applications could end up being the "killer app" for IPv6.
The US Army in various guises controls vast swathes of address space, but there are also lots of corporations with a 256th of IPv4 all to themselves: Halliburton, GE, Prudential, Ford, etc. MIT also appears to be the last university still hanging onto their own block.
Use `whois` to see who controls the IP address and then contact them. As others have noted, you won't be able to route a single address differently, so your best bet would be to host with the controlling entity.
For example, lets say you wanted 199.255.255.254. That's controlled by hostwinds.com, which offers VPS hosting. There doesn't seem to be anyone on that IP address. The reverse DNS lookup makes it appear that it's in their normal client space. A phone call to the right person there might get you what you want.
You couldn't just get a single IP address, you'd have to buy a routable block that contains that IP address, which while I believe technically is a /28, in practice is a /24 (256 addresses)
Just curious, how many ip addresses does Amazon have for their cloud services? What would happen if they ran out and were unable to obtain more in a timely manner?
Back in November 2014, there were at least 10,130,200 IP addresses in the EC2 range. So there are potentially way more than that today due to growth of EC2 and IP addresses required for other AWS services.
For someone providing content (websites, applications, internet-based software, etc) there is a need to support both IPv4 and IPv6 clients for a while.
For most consumers IPv6 will already work on many sites, and I expect that to increase considerably over the next 1-2 years.
If you want to query some services (such as Google Search or Google Maps API), you may encounter throttling issues.
Having multiple IPv4 addresses helps to alleviate that problem.
IPv4 address also has reputation attached to it.
That reputation is much move valuable that reputation on IPv6 address, because cost of IPv6 is pretty much zero, but IPv4 costs $10+ per address.
[+] [-] tjgq|11 years ago|reply
This is a honest question. I would like to know how we avoid ending up in a world where a few large companies control all the available IPv4 addresses (which they don't really need) so they can rent them to the rest of us at exhorbitant prices.
IPv6 won't render the problem moot - it's likely that IPv4 addresses will remain a necessity for globally reachable services for years to come, regardless of IPv6 adoption.
[+] [-] gardarh|11 years ago|reply
I guess that when IPv4 addresses are traded in a free market it is easier to realise the cost of not adopting IPv6, eventually leading to a faster adoption (which is a good thing for everyone, NAT is essentially making the internet a lot less cooler place than it could be).
Also, what would the alternative be? Just not handing out IPv4 blocks to new players and telling them "tough luck"? Or a lottery? I really don't know a better alternative to a free market.
[+] [-] EthanHeilman|11 years ago|reply
IANA specifically states that a free-market of IP addresses would be harmful, instead they argue that IP allocation should be based on need and not treated as property.
>ISPs are required to utilize address space in an efficient manner. To this end, ISPs should have documented justification available for each assignment. The regional registry may, at any time, ask for this information. If the information is not available, future allocations may be impacted. In extreme cases, existing loans may be impacted. RFC 2050
Big companies have fought them on this and won.
>The court held that Nortel had an exclusive right to use the legacy numbers. The court also explicitly sanctioned Nortel’s exclusive right to transfer its exclusive right to use the numbers. In recognizing Nortel’s exclusive right to use legacy IPv4 numbers, the court implicitly found that Nortel had the exclusive right to possess the numbers themselves. Consequently, Nortel could exclude others from possession and use of the same legacy IPv4 numbers. In other words, the court found Nortel possessed the customary “bundle of rights” commonly associated with the ownership of tangible or intangible property. - Property Rights in IPv4 Numbers: Recognizing a New Form of Intellectual Property
[+] [-] bradleyjg|11 years ago|reply
Which isn't to say that any initial allocation will satisfy us as fair or that the outcome will satisfy us as fair, but a top down system may well end up being neither fair nor efficient.
[+] [-] Arnt|11 years ago|reply
Also, we're currently in a world where no large company owns even 1% of the addresses, and heading towards one where IPv6 is the majority of traffic. Have a look at http://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html and pretend to be an IPv4 address investor. The year-end figures are about 0.4, 1.0, 2.5 and 5.7%, so a little over 100% yearly growth for each of the past three years. If that goes on, we'll pass 50% IPv6 in 2017, and if that happens I rather doubt that IPv4 addresses will be worth much.
Of course that projection doesn't have to be right. Perhaps IPv6 growth slows down. But if you were an investor, would you invest heavily in v4 addresses on the assumption that IPv6 growth slows down? If so, why do you assume it'll slow down?
Oh, and I do think IPv6 will render IPv4 moot. Assuming that trading goes on, IPv4 will increasingly use tunnels and long-prefix routes, and then it'll have the kind of reliability problems v6 had around 2005.
[+] [-] wmf|11 years ago|reply
Compared to a world where you can't get IPs at any price? Seems pretty obvious: you can get IPs.
I would like to know how we avoid ending up in a world where a few large companies control all the available IPv4 addresses (which they don't really need) so they can rent them to the rest of us at exorbitant prices.
It seems like the cloud is already going there with only a few large providers. All I can suggest is to buy your IPs now before Amazon does.
[+] [-] bluedevil2k|11 years ago|reply
EDIT: Fixed the number of addresses in a /18
[+] [-] davidu|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoachimSchipper|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mianosm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spullara|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tjgq|11 years ago|reply
Another point to consider is that there are things you can do with IPv6 connectivity that are very difficult/costly, or outright impossible, in NATted IPv4 land.
Personally, I'm waiting for the next generation of peer-to-peer protocols that make use of end-to-end IPv6 connectivity instead of hole-punching and proxying through third-parties. (Case study: ever thought how ridiculous it is that in 2015 it's still non-trivial to send a large file to someone over the Internet without using some sort of storage service?)
It's plausible that one of those new applications could end up being the "killer app" for IPv6.
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|11 years ago|reply
The problem is that IPv4 is not forwards-compatible.
[+] [-] jpatokal|11 years ago|reply
The US Army in various guises controls vast swathes of address space, but there are also lots of corporations with a 256th of IPv4 all to themselves: Halliburton, GE, Prudential, Ford, etc. MIT also appears to be the last university still hanging onto their own block.
[+] [-] im2w1l|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jewel|11 years ago|reply
For example, lets say you wanted 199.255.255.254. That's controlled by hostwinds.com, which offers VPS hosting. There doesn't seem to be anyone on that IP address. The reverse DNS lookup makes it appear that it's in their normal client space. A phone call to the right person there might get you what you want.
[+] [-] matthewarkin|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smackfu|11 years ago|reply
If the first octet of the IP address that you want is in that list, it's probably owned by someone who isn't selling.
[+] [-] bluedevil2k|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoshGlazebrook|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ertemplin|11 years ago|reply
Source: http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-ip-ranges-json/
[+] [-] smtucker|11 years ago|reply
Is it so you can communicate with servers or clients that don't facilitate any form of IPv6?
[+] [-] tptacek|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandstrom|11 years ago|reply
For most consumers IPv6 will already work on many sites, and I expect that to increase considerably over the next 1-2 years.
[+] [-] dennisgorelik|11 years ago|reply
Having multiple IPv4 addresses helps to alleviate that problem.
IPv4 address also has reputation attached to it. That reputation is much move valuable that reputation on IPv6 address, because cost of IPv6 is pretty much zero, but IPv4 costs $10+ per address.
[+] [-] JoshGlazebrook|11 years ago|reply
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