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Black Market May Develop For IPv4 Addresses
GMGruman writes "Everyone knows that we're running out of traditional IPv4 Internet addresses and that switching to IPv6 is the answer — yet foot-dragging by IT departments and vendors means the problem is still on the back burner. IPv4/IPv6 coexistence is now expected to last for 5 years. In this article, Mel Beckman explains how this is all leading to a black market in traditional IPv4 addresses that will catch many people off-guard, and boost Internet access prices sky-high."
People don't understand numbers, they just hit the "0" and "9" keys until the number they're typing in "looks big" or "looks small".
How do you secretly buy something that only works, by definition, if the public routing table knows it belongs to you?
Can someone please explain what any of this means to me, as an end user? I have a router (Time Capsule) seems to support IPv6, and my computer does too.
Not quite. Numerically, you will still have the same "public" IPv4 address that you have today (either dynamic or static). It is just that it will be like that _Star Trek NG_ episode where, upon hearing something munching on the Enterprise's hull, Dr. Crusher asks the ship's computer "What is the nature of the universe?" to which the answer comes back "The universe is an oblate spheroid one kilometer in diameter." In the IPv4-lives-on-forever world, "public" will be redefined to "among all of the subscribers of the same ISP" (not "worldwide" anymore). Then *all* IPv4 addresses (other than loopback and test ranges) will be NATed between ISPs/carriers. In other words, there will not be one Internet address-space anymore, but rather one IPv4-sized address space per ISP/carrier/telco. The goal is to carve the single Internet up into multiple per-telco Internets with interworking at the telco-to-telco or ISP-to-ISP boundary. There will be the AT&T Internet and separately the Verizon Internet and separately the Deutsche Telekom Internet and so forth.
If IPv4 addresses become very expensive, people will just ... switch to IPv6.
Yeah. That's how free markets solve problems, be they black, or any other color.
Do something about it, you are a customer after all. (Assuming you have a choice about which ISP you give your business to, and aren't in some horrible monopoly situation)
i) Complain to your ISP, ask them why they don't support IPv6
ii) Threaten to switch to an ISP that does support IPv6
iii) Actually switch to an ISP that supports IPv6, and tell your old ISP why you are moving.
Companies will listen to their wallets, if nothing else.
and yes, my ISP supports IPv6 native & tunneled and has a 6to4 gateway if you don't want to dual-stack
Forget what's officially on paper regarding the lower 64 bits of an IPv6 address. As a practical matter, the bits are yours to use, or yours to intentionally discard and ignore. Nobody can force you to use an unholy address with 128 pseudo-meaningful bits. In reality, a typical home cable internet or DSL customer should get a /48 address. That means the upper 48 bits are assigned by your ISP, and the lower 80 bits are yours to use or ignore as you please.
48 bits translates into three chunks of the address. Initially, they'll look like this:
2001:xxxx:xxxx
where xxxx:xxxx is unique for your global service provider (read: AT&T, Global Crossing, Telia, etc), and the top few bits are unique to your country. Eventually, the top 16 bits (first chunk) will be unique to a country. So unless you're in Europe, 99% of the addresses you deal with daily will start with the same chunk. A little more annoying than a.b.c.d, but not quite insurmountable.
Now, the lower 80 bits. Officially, there's some nonsense somewhere about using the MAC address to derive it. It's voluntary, and lots of people have said they won't be following it because it turns your ethernet card into a globally-unique cookie that can be shared via out of band means. It's led to no small number of fights between the autoconfiguration faction and the DHCP6 faction. In the long run, the DHCP6 faction will win. So, getting back to those 80 bits...
Right now, you're dealing with 64 bits whether you know it or not: the 32 bits in your public IP address, and the 32 bits in your NAT'ed private addressses. Your home PC's IP address isn't 64.82.19.34, it's 64.82.19.34 + 192.168.100.69, with a port-forwarding router in the middle to glue them together. There's nothing to stop you from treating your IPv6 address the same way, even if it slightly stomps on the original official intent of how the bits should be used. If you want to, your home PC's 80-bit IPv6 address can be ::1. More likely than not, your router (still needed for 6-4 translation) will be ::1 though, so let's make your home pc ::2. So, here's your home PC's new IPv6 address: 2001:aaaa:bbbb:cccc::2 (aaaa, bbbb, and cccc are 16-bit hex values). Or maybe uuuu.aaaa.bbbb.cccc (where "uuuu" is the same for most addresses you encounter at the raw address level daily).
Let's suppose you want to be cute, and have a home network whose 4 and 6 aspects cleanly map to each other, and you don't mind doing some ugly binary math behind the scenes for the sake of human-readability. Your internal network's ipv4 addresses are in the 192.168.100.x block. Your 4-6 router is 192.168.100.1, and your desktop PC is 192.168.100.2. So, you configure your IPv6 addresses to be:
uuuu:aaaa:bbbb:cccc::192:168:100:1 and uuuu:aaaa:bbbb:cccc::192:168:100:2 for the router and PC. Yes, in this case, you're abusing bits and pretending that 0x0192 means something special (the way 192 meant 0xC0, which had a special meaning to the router), but it's mainly to illustrate that IPv6 addresses don't HAVE to be horrific trainwrecks of unmemorable bits. If you're determined, you can make them look quite a bit like ipv4 addresses within the realm of your own network if you really want to. At the end of the day, is
24:3cf2:8d99::2 (your home PC), or even 24:3cf2:8d99::192:168:100:2
really any worse than
64.87.142.98 -> 192.168.100.2 ??
The truth is, the IPv6 crowd has been its own worst enemy by trying to force needless address complexity. IPv6 has lots of bits, and if you ignore the majority that you're entitled to ignore, it doesn't have to be a lot worse than ipv4. It can even be better.