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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."
How do you secretly buy something that only works, by definition, if the public routing table knows it belongs to you?
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.