Re: Addressing plan exercise for our IPv6 course

[Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>]

On Jul 29, 2010, at 10:32 AM, Tim Franklin wrote:

> > Why waste valuable people's time to conserve nearly valueless
> > renewable resources?
>
> See my earlier comments on "upsell" and "control".  While you have some ISPs starting from the mentality that gives 
> us "accepting incoming connections is a chargeable extra", they're also going to be convinced that there's a revenue 
> opportunity in segmenting customers who want N of some resource from those who want 2N, 4N, ...  That the resource in 
> question is, for all practical purposes, both free and infinite (cue someone with a 'tragedy of the commons' 
> analysis) does not factor - if they want more, they must pay more!
If you want to build a business based on upsell and control by trying to convince users that
they should give you extra money to provision a resource that costs you virtually nothing,
then more power to you.

However, I think this will, in the end, be as popular as american restaurants that charge
for ice water.

Consumers are moderately ignorant, but, not completely stupid. Address scarcity has
allowed this model to succeed to some extent in IPv4, largely due to lack of alternatives
and the fact that all consumer ISPs operate on this model.

In IPv6, there is no scarcity, some ISPs will offer alternatives, and, consumers will
rapidly learn about this disparity and I'm guessing that a model that says:

Network Numbers Our Cost                        You Pay
1                                       $0.000000001            $0.00
2                                       $0.000000002            $1.00
4                                       $0.000000004            $2.00

etc.

Is probably going to be at a significant competitive disadvantage vs. a model
that says "You can have whatever address space you can justify. We'll start
you with 65,536 networks which we believe is way more than enough for
virtually any residential user. We don't charge you anything for address
space. We think charging people for integers is illogical."

However, if you think there is a competitive or revenue advantage, more power
to you.

Owen