Re: Market-based address allocation

["Steven M. Bellovin" <smb () research att com>]

In message <3EB03565.1040202 () brightok net>, Jack Bates writes:
> Bill Nickless wrote:
>
> > As a thought experiment, think of how the IPv4 addressing situation 
> > (bogon advertisements, allocations, explosion of routing table sizes, 
> > etc) would be different if the IP community treated IP addresses as a 
> > commodity.
>
> Actually, your entire argument starts off very poorly. You are stating 
> that IP addresses should be treated as a commodity, yet what you are 
> really trying to state is that routing advertisements should be treated 
> as a commodity. These are two different concepts. If we pay for IP 
> addresses, there's still nothing to keep us from advertising longer 
> prefixes. If we pay for advertisements, large providers will just work 
> it into their peering agreements and then collect money from their 
> customers for their adverts.You'd also have to figure out who pays who? 
> Do I get paid for every route sent to me? I usually have 120,000+ routes 
> sitting in my router. Please send me my money.
>
> If you aren't refering to advertisements, then bogon advertisements, 
> hijackings, and route table explosions will still be an issue. Without 
> mandating necessity, I'd also point out that there would no longer be 
> IPv4 address space available except at outrageous prices for smaller 
> networks that wish to multi-home and have their own netblocks.
>
> -Jack
See http://www.research.att.com/~smb/papers/piara/index.html for a 
paper on the subject.  (We held a BoF at the IETF many years ago; there 
was sufficient pushback that we didn't pursue the question.)


                --Steve Bellovin, http://www.research.att.com/~smb (me)
                http://www.wilyhacker.com (2nd edition of "Firewalls" book)