more on China Builds a Better Internet

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: WWWhatsup <joly () dti net>
Date: September 25, 2006 4:31:41 PM EDT
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Subject: Re: more on China Builds a Better Internet


[I fwded those 'China' posts to the isoc members list gaining the  
following response]


From: Fred Baker <fred () cisco com>
Subject: Re:  more on  China Builds a Better Internet
Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 10:53:14 -0700




> 2) We continue to consume IPv4 addresses at a steady, if not
>   accelerating rate. There are of course continuing debates as to
>   exactly when we will "run out" of IPv4 addresses (and what that
>   means), but instead of being "decades" away, the proverbial light
>   at the end of the tunnel can be seen. Fairly conservative estimates
>   point to only 6 years left.

for the record, those estimates measure different things. Hain's
estimates suggest that we will allocate the last IPv4 address (eg,
IANA will allocate to an RIR who will allocate to an ISP, who will
start thinking about how to use it) in the 2009 timeframe, while
Huston's estimates measure announcements in BGP from ISPs, and last I
heard were in the 2013 timeframe. There is a built-in lag between the
events, generally on the order of 1-2 years. So suppose that Tony is
a year early and Geoff is a year late - in that case, they pretty
much agree. The "last" IPv4 would be allocated in 2010 and announced
in 2012.

 From my perspective there is another scenario that is much more
important. That is that the fundamental rules of economics govern
IPv4 and IPv6 addresses just like they cover any other finite
resource. In such systems, one can expect that in the beginning, when
supply far outstrips demand and nobody really cares, we will probably
do some fairly stupid things - like assign them in class blocks. When
demand approximates supply, we can expect a market to develop and for
an improvement in our intelligence to set in, such as happened with
RFCs 1518 and 1918. As demand starts to significantly exceed supply,
we can expect to see regulation of that market, and I would invite
you to take a look at your favorite RIR's rules for allocation of
IPv4 address space. Without getting dramatic, I think it is fair to
say that you have to have some pretty good proof that you used your
previous allocation well and have a strong likelihood of using the
new one well. In the final stages, a black market develops, one in
which theft occurs (http://www.completewhois.com/hijacked/ 
hijacked_qa.htm),
lawsuits are filed (For those interested, you may   read the Kremen  
vs ARIN lawsuit here:
http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache: 
44uxmnEmJVkJ:www.internetgovernance.org/pdf/kremen.pdf+Kremen+Vs  
+ARIN&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1 ), and the commodity is directly traded
among participants in the market at higher prices. The "price" of an
IP address may not be a monetary cost, but in headaches encountered.

In the final analysis, I don't think we will ever allocate the "last"
IPv4 address. We will "price" them, for some definition of pricing,
so high that nobody will be able to afford them.



> I do wish people would stop propagating that "MIT has more IP
> addresses than all of china" meme.

To my shame, I'm the guy who originated that. When I showed the slide
at ChinaInet 2000 that asserted that (and got the name of the school
wrong), it was true. But my point was not that APNIC had committed
some form of wrong-doing. That slide was one in a series that argued
that China, where I was giving the talk, needed to get serious about
Internet deployment, and that specifically to address the needs of a
population of 1.5 billion people it would have to move in the
direction of an IP address space with that many addresses - as
adjusted by the H ratio. They needed to move into IPv6 as IPv4 would
not have the address space they needed.

I have seen that slide in talks selling my competitor's product,
slides selling the ITU as an even broker in the Internet Governance
debate (which I will believe after I find +886 in the enum database;
geo-politics is keeping a recognized PSTN country code out of the
enum database because the relevant communication region's status as a
country is disputed and they are not a member of the ITU), and
others. In most cases, I wonder whether they even know the origin of
the slide.

Of course, at this point China has quite a few more addresses than it
did then. But the entire unallocated IPv4 address space doesn't have
enough addresses to represent the Chinese educational system, much
less China as a whole. The original argument is still valid.


---------------------------------------------------------------
             WWWhatsup NYC
http://pinstand.com - http://punkcast.com
---------------------------------------------------------------



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