nanog mailing list archives

Re: IPv6 Thought Experiment


From: Daniel Seagraves <dseagrav () humancapitaldev com>
Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2019 16:13:12 -0500


On Oct 2, 2019, at 4:04 PM, Nick Hilliard <nick () foobar org> wrote:

Antonios Chariton wrote on 02/10/2019 17:33:
What if, globally, and starting at January 1st, 2020, someone (imagine a government or similar, but with global 
reach) imposed an IPv4 tax. For every IPv4 address on the Global Internet Routing Table, you had to pay a tax. Let’s 
assume that this can be imposed, must be paid, and cannot be avoided using some loophole. Let’s say that this tax 
would be $2, and it would double, every 3 or 6 months.

Interesting idea.  Let's say it started off at $2 / month and doubled every 3 months.  At the end of month 12, it 
would be $32/month.  After 5 years, we'd be talking about just over $2 million per IP address per month, i.e. a 
little over half a billion dollars per /24.

What happens when v4 is gone? Surely you won’t let it end there - After all, If you have the ability and infrastructure 
to do this, why not tax IPv6 too? This would cut down on the number of “undesirables" on the internet by pricing it out 
of the reach of all but the largest megacorporations. Eventually we can reduce the internet to a few dozen authorized 
parties in each region and we’ll only need enough IP addresses for those. I can imagine a number of governments around 
the world would be very interested in this.


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