Re: Independent space from ARIN

[Yakov Rekhter <yakov () juniper net>]

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.