Slashdot Mirror
Markets For IPv4 Addresses Emerging
netbuzz writes "An active marketplace for buying and selling IPv4 addresses is materializing, and policymakers are clarifying the rules associated with how network operators can monetize this increasingly scarce resource. At least four websites are serving as brokers for organizations that want to sell or lease IPv4 address space. The activity comes in the wake of Nortel's recent sale of 666,624 IPv4 addresses to Microsoft for $7.5 million, or $11.25 per address."
I'll give you a good price too!
If everything had been followed according-to-plan, IPv4 addresses would be essentially worthless right now. Given that they aren't, I guess we failed in following that plan.
My money's all in IPv4 addresses! Soon, OPEC will be pricing gold in iPV4 addresses and I'll be rich.
or 8.8.8.8?
or 88.8.88.8?
etc.
you could sell any one of those addresses in china or taiwan for millions each
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Yeah, but as the article says, this may help get businesses to move on to IPv6 quicker.
I've got a bunch of IP addresses that my router hands out available because I'm not using them all. They range from 192.168.1.2 to 192.168.1.254 so at $11.25 per address that'll be $2,846.25
Woot!
Now ISPs and core networks have another excuse not to transition to IPv6. It will destroy this "market". 2^32 addresses is now a feature, not a bug.
The only thing that hasn't gone according to plan is that, apparently, Microsoft doesn't understand that routers that grok IPv6 are a lot cheaper than $11 per addressable address...
It is not possible to sell individual addresses. Period. It is not possible to sell small allocations between networks either. You can't keep your /28 address space if you move. Minimum space is /24 and that has to be assigned by the registrar or you "buy it" from someone with the blessing of the registrar. Of course, they would not allow the IP address space to be fragmented as that would cause more problems than it solves.
This is akin to routing phone numbers. In the past, numbers were hardwired to specific access areas. This remains true for most part today. The exception is today you can route phone numbers via IP (ie. internet). This allows us to have a market for phone numbers.
Is this possible with IP addresses? Sure! We "just" need a larger, more flexible address space where IPv4 can be assigned to. We could even call it something like, I don't know, IPv6. Then when network transitions to this space, the old IPv4 could use inventions like tunneling and IPSec to route IPv4 addresses over IPv6 for legacy applications thereby allowing individual IPv4 address to be portable!
I predict that IPv4-only access will become a sort of hallmark for services that prefer to cater to the relatively well-off.
TFA talks about an "incentive" for everyone to get on IPv6, but markets often have the opposite effect.
...because this is the worst kind of lock in for ipv4: people who, now that the ipv4 landgrab is over, have the opportunity to monetize this artificial scarcity have precisely zero interest in switching to ipv6, because it makes no business sense. Just like all the good domain names were registered in 1997, greatly increasing the value for the early birds and the big corporations, all "good" ips are now allocated.
Now not only have new sites to come up with unsquatted, original, decent domain names on non-shady TLDs, now they even have to beg scammers for a public IP.
The internet just won't evolve itself into using ipv6. The 'hidden hand' will not give up this opportunity to turn a landgrab into a moneygrab.
I'm afraid government action -- yes, that thing you pay with taxes -- will be needed to shut this crap before it even begins and force the times of the ipv6 transitions over.
As if.
Why does everything have to be monetized? Why can't ARIN just reclaim blocks that are not well utilized and reissue them? Does HP really need two /8 blocks?
Will router's routing tables grow too big from all this?
The best test environment is production. - Me
chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
like buying 100s of 1000s of IPv4 addresses. I'll sell them another 42 of them to bring them up to the 666,666 they were looking for.
Nullius in verba
Half price if your name is Jenny.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I bet someone at Interop is losing their job over this one...
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Here is how I see this going down:
Route counts are climbing fast /8 homes will make it necessary to advertise subnets
Moving IP blocks around from their nice chunky
AS numbers will not be issued to the fragmented blocks once the routing tables are a nice fat size and some older routers can't handle it (again, this type of thing has happened before) OR when they decide to just not hand out AS numbers for these fragmented blocks (to force the issue)
No AS number, no ability to route a subnet differently from the entire block. No resale value in an unrouteable block
Upgrades needed to handle the growing routing table AND/OR blocks are too large and unwieldy to be moved to where the customers need them
IPv6 wins by default because of the need to upgrade either way, even if it has to coexist for a long time
Kind of a high level view, and I don't know all the ins and outs of AS number assignment, but I think that strangling that resource would work nicely even if a few policies needed changing.
md5sum
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
May be upgradable to /20 as it was reserved if it is justifiable. I am the owner and original applicant. We can go over details. Contact me at jayk75 at hotmail dot com. This is a USA registered block, clean (no abuse, spam, illegal activity etc). A /24 was used for about a year in early 2000 but otherwise has remained unrouted.
This block is not subject to any arin policies or regulations and no agreements have been signed or updated with arin.
When I'm on IPv4 and you're on IPv6, whose do you think will get blamed for it being broken? Oh, yours because I can access 99% of the Internet just fine, just not you. Everybody who wants a server or just have their Internet work "normally" will want an IPv4 address.
Sure, eventually IPv6 will work all that shit out. But mostly people would rather pay a few bucks and make it somebody else's problem. You try it, switch an ISP's customers to IPv6 and watch the wires glow as people go nuts because their silly little app from 1997 doesn't support IPv6 addresses. I dare you and your $11/ip router to do it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Nortel has about 33k employees, why do they have so many addresses? Is there really a shortage or just many more stories like this?
maybe by buying them from nortel some shareholders or bond holders will recoup more 'losses' tax free? Who knows, MS may be envisioning a scenario where the IPv4 networks float around for certain legacy devices long after the rest of us are doing everything IPv6.
Or maybe they just figured having them trapped in limbo doing nothing was definitely bad, and doing something with them was worth 7 million dollars compared to them floating around bankruptcy court for another 3 years, and if they're wrong, it's only 7 million bucks, which on MS's scale is nothing.
People pay for fake domain names through New.net, so I don't see why they wouldn't pay for IPv4 addresses.
As they say, there's a sucker born every minute.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I can finally put my class C to use. Seriously, there's so much allocated by unused space that a free market is needed to make proper use of it.
I've been telling my friends this would happen for more than a couple of years. They've always laughed at me. The sad part is most of them work for ISPs and yet they never saw the bigger picture. They've always seemed to think it was in everybody's best interest to support v6. Well, it isn't. v4 connectivity _will_ become a privilege that only content providers and a few others will enjoy. It's the **AA's wet dream come true, it will be far easier to fight 'piracy'.
Go live in North Korea commie!
.
Some American company will spend $$$ to buy the block from China but for less than the price of of a migration to IPv6. They will meet their goals of keeping the share price up for the next quarter even if it means that they still have to spend the money some where down the road when some other sap of a CEO is in charge. The company will declare they are "winning".
At $11.25 per address, that extrapolates to $40B ($48.3B minus private, multicast, and government addresses). Isn't that what Bill Gates is worth?.
German Telekom will enable IPv6 for all their 12 million broadband customers by the end of this year.
Dual stack, they will all still use an IPv4 address. If all ISPs had done this years ago and we had slowly phased out IPv4 in favor of IPv6 this would have worked. Now it will do nothing to lessen the blow of the brick wall we're running into.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Incorrect. Blocks allocated prior to ARIN are still maintained in the ARIN database accordingly to community policies. This includes processing contract, updates, being reclaimed, etc.
/John
John Curran President and CEO
ARIN
BULLSHIT
The problem is that the v6 transition plan was/is to migrate from v4 only-->dual stack-->v6 only. The trouble is that when all the services and clients you connect to have v4 then there is little incentive to implement dual stack and while there are a significant number of v4 only nodes going v6 only is not a reasonable option for nodes that need to communicate with the rest of the world. Without any real motivation to migrate to dual stack we have reached a situation where the majority of nodes are still v4 only yet v4 addresses have run out in the apnic region and are perilously close to running out in the rest of the world. ISPs are finally starting to deploy dual stack but it's still likely to be years (if ever) before dual stack is available to all users and years more before most of those customers are equipped to actually use it.
Protocol translation has been considered but the general feeling seems to be that it causes more trouble than it solves and it seems unlikely it will ever be widely implemented. Translation to link v4 clients to v6 servers is especially problematic because of the need to tie the translation boxes to the dns servers.
ISPs that serve end users can recover IPs from those clients by pushing them behind ISP level NAT, ISPs that only deal with backbone and/or hosting will have to either give up on growth or buy their IPs on the market.
Given that MS is trying to get into cloud hosting buying a bunch of IPs now seems like a rather smart move.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Enabling IPv6 is very different from switching customers to IPv6.
Enabling IPv6 while leaving v4 active won't piss anyone off and is the right thing to do but it won't solve the v4 exhaustion problem in the short term. However Introducing v6 only nodes (that is "switching" users to IPv6) isn't really practical until pretty much everyone else has moved to dual stack and that just isn't going to happen in the short term (i'd say years at best). Therefore the v4 exhaustion problem will have to be addessed in some other way be it ISP level v4 NAT or some form of protocol translation*. Providers who have no end lusers to force behind ISP level NAT will have to buy their IP addresses on the market.
* Personally I think protocol translation generally creates more problems than it solves though it may be worth deploying for a few legacy systems in a post transition world.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Wait, is this that after-market for conversion like we saw for Y2K?
Also, forgive the poor phrasing, but can everyone in IPv6 see each other? Can we just ditch all that eHow and Experts Exchange junk all in one swoop? It's like a giant Reset Button for the Internet. "Everything that matters will migrate because the people that care will do it. 15 years of legacy will fall away."
Go Go Gadget Nevinyrral's Disk!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I may not be understanding this correctly, but isn't this the kind of problem that NAT64 can solve? If IPv6 home users are NAT'd for their access to the IPv4 world (by their routers doing translation initially, then I guess later on the ISP level) surely the transition could work smoothly? Home users retain close to equivalent functionality, and use IPv6 as more IPv6 becomes available and we start building up the critical mass needed to make the switch happen.
My understanding is that protocol translation (nat64 and nat46) is more trouble than it's worth in the short to medium term (in the long term I see it as a valid method for supporting legacy systems on an internet that is 99% v6 should we ever reach that state).
Nat64 can allow v6 only clients to access v4 only resources. Essentially it can be considered as an alternative to running v6 in paralell with natted v4. It means end systems are forced to support v6 to get any internet access at all* and requires mangling DNS**.
Nat46 can allow v4 only end systems to reach v6 only end systems but it's even messier than nat64 since it requires shared state between the nat46 system and the associated DNS mangler.
* which may be a pro for the internet in general but is certainly a con for the customers of the implementing ISP who will likely be forced to replace equipment
** which I regard as a bad thing
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I'm sorry, but isn't this just prolonging in the inevitable?
I think there's light at the end of the IPv6 tunnel. Now that the world knows that the IPv4 game is up (not withstanding events like June 8's "World IPv6 Day") the pressure to convert to IPv6 will come fast and furious. Hell, someone's even figured out how to get FTP running on IPv6, and that's a 40-year old protocol!
We need a forced migration of the mobile world to IPv6. The mobile people have the advantage that the carrier controls both the phone and the ISP, so they can upgrade them compatibly. Most of the growth is in mobile, after all.
"ChinaMobile" seems to be doing this already.
Most OS'es will use IPv6 in the dual-stack case if at all possible (which leads to it's own problems : the IPv6 route table isn't nearly as well-guarded as the IPv4 one, so there are more routing problems and they don't get fixed nearly as fast).
With some luck, this won't totally overload their helpdesks and they'll continue it. Because, frankly, $11.26 once is a hell of a lot cheaper than customer service per customer on a yearly basis.
Wait, is this that after-market for conversion like we saw for Y2K?
Just the reverse imho. Y2K had lots of buy-in and few real problems. Today we have lots of problems, from routing table explosion to address exhaustion, with very little buy-in to the only thing that remotely resembles a solution. Of course, the powers that be only give a thought to the easiest and most trivial of the problems, address exhaustion.
Also, forgive the poor phrasing, but can everyone in IPv6 see each other?
No. Unless he-cogent has been solved. I could login and check if I weren't so lazy. I'm sure this is not the only case of this problem.
The internet is basically a big collection of unidirectional traffic exchange (this is how BGP works). This *could* lead to a full graph (everyone can communicate with everyone else), but it doesn't. There are a few technical caveats, which sometimes interrupt connectivity (e.g. ghost routes, bgp loops, ...). But mostly there are political problems which prevent global routing from working (and I'm not talking about Iran and China, I'm talking disputes between companies.
Can we just ditch all that eHow and Experts Exchange junk all in one swoop?
No, in fact IPv6, by expanding everything, will probably expand this problem too. The alternative is censorship, let's not go there.
It's like a giant Reset Button for the Internet.
Unless we network engineers collectively and massively screw up, no it isn't. Nobody wants that. And we certainly don't want international censorship to be implemented as a result of the transition.
"Everything that matters will migrate because the people that care will do it. 15 years of legacy will fall away."
Again, no it won't. New and more troubling versions of all problems in IPv4 have already manifested and are affecting at least some backbones. Furthermore, running dual-stack has a lot of new problems as well.
Go Go Gadget Nevinyrral's Disk!
Go !
it's things like this make you wonder who designed IPv6 and why they didn't think it would have to coexist. the answers to those questions for IPv4 are obvious.
Well any system that lets clients* that only understand "short" addresses access servers* that only have "long" addreses is going to get very messy because it HAS to involve stateful mangling of name resolution (or whatever other method is used to find servers). Going the other way is not quite as messy because the mangling doesn't have to be statefull but mostly there are less messy ways of achieving the goal of letting systems without a public v4 address access v4 resources (such as ds-lite**).
What is IMO a problem is the lack of a good way for clients that understand v6 bur only have a natted v4 address (e.g. the vast majority of end systems now thanks to ISPs shipping nat routers as standard customer premises equipment) to access v6 resources. 6to4 requires a public v4 address and teredo "fights" NAT (which while having obvious advantages in peer to peer applications where someone wants to run a server* behind a v4 NAT makes it unnecessarily fragile for normal applications).
The other problem is that thanks to XPs longevity many systems that can support v6 (either natively or through transition mechanisms) don't actually have it enabled. You can't really blame the designers of IPv6 for that one through.
* for these purposes a client is a system that creates connections and a server is a system that receives connections
** ds-lite is actually a really elagent soloution and it's a pity it appeared so late in the game. It lets the customers connect to the ISP over a pure v6 network (thus avoiding net10 exhaustion problems for large ISPs) while still providing the customers with what amounts to natted v4 access and with only a single layer of NAT (which as I understand it has advantages for traversal techniques).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register