The use of market mechanisms to allocate radio spectrum is now pretty much the norm around the world. The only countries that might object to such mechanisms on ideological grounds are either powerless to object (Cuba, North Korea) or considerably more concerned about ensuring access to IP addresses. (China). Even if there was an intention to resist transfer, it would be impossible to police and would be grossly counterproductive as it would encourage parties to hoard IPv4 addresses 'just in case' they needed them. The real question is pricing. I am pretty sure that the demand for static, non-NATed IPv4 addresses is way less than the supply, so the price should not be prohibitive. The problem is that in the US and many other parts of the world, broadband access is a monopoly or duopoly. so in order for the 5% of Comcast customers who really need a static IP address to ensue that they get one at a fair cost, their only effective recourse at present is to use their regulatory influence to force Comcast to provide non-NAT IPv4 service. Thus exacerbating the supply shortfall. What ISPs should be doing to protect their interests is to require that their access point provider (cable modem/ DSL modem) produce a box that can provide seamless protocol conversion, allowing a native IPv4 service, dual stack IPv4/IPv6 service and IPv6 plus NATed IPv4 to be switched seamlessly. That way they can reduce the demand for IPv4 addresses such that the demand for IPv4 addresses does not exceed supply. If for whatever reason, this is the case and IPv4 addresses are selling for a premium, they can then switch over some number of their customers to IPv6 plus NAT service and sell the addresses on the open market. My guess is that the limiting price for an IPv4 address in this scenario is the cost of a customer service call. Say $10 per address. So imagine that IPv4 addresses hit $10 on the spot market (yes there will be one) and MegaISP has 1 million subscribers, 50% of which have compatible modems (or modems that can be flash upgraded) and that 90% of their customers will be happy with an IPv6+NAT address. MegaISP starts by switching the 500,000 customers it can switch to NATted service. 50,000 customers complain and insist on IPv4 service, thats a customer support call each at $10, so $500,000 Then there is the cost of the NAT boxes to support the customers who are switched - say $1 million So the costs are $1.5 million and at the end they sell off 450,000 IPv4 for $10 each a total of $4.5Million, leaving $3 million in profit and 450,000 saved IPv4 addresses. On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 4:19 AM, Shane Kerr <shane@xxxxxxx> wrote: > Tony, > > [top-posting since that's what you did] > > AIUI, the intention is not for the RIRs to be "controlling the market", > but rather to provide the same value they do now: a location where I can > see who is responsible for a given address. > > I think the RIRs all have a transfer policy now. So when a prefix is > sold, what amounts to a transfer of deed needs to happen, the same as if > you buy or otherwise acquire land. This is not control of IP sales any > more than the local town deed registry controls the real estate market. > > -- > Shane > > On Mon, 2009-09-28 at 10:13 -0700, Tony Hain wrote: >> Look at http://www.nro.net/ for the current process. Look at >> http://www.ebay.com/ for the process once the IANA & RIR pools are >> allocated. There are misguided fantasy discussions about controlling the >> market in the RIR context, but given that their charters explicitly say that >> they make no statement about the utility or routing of any allocation, they >> have absolutely no leverage on whatever transactions a market might produce. >> Look to the CIDR deployment filtering wars to see that the business side of >> each ISP will beat down the technical side every time, so expect that the >> routing system will routinely carry /28-29 IPv4 prefixes in a few years. > > > _______________________________________________ > Ietf mailing list > Ietf@xxxxxxxx > https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf > -- -- New Website: http://hallambaker.com/ View Quantum of Stupid podcasts, Tuesday and Thursday each week, http://quantumofstupid.com/ _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf