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."

Comments

Troubling for IPv6 adoption

[Ironchew]

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.

Re:Troubling for IPv6 adoption

[Ironchew]

Knowing the greedy telecom companies, they'll try and sucker us all into ISP-level NAT first. After all, NAT works fine if home users are good consumers, passively web-surfing and connecting to "content providers" for any server needs.

Re:Troubling for IPv6 adoption

[Midnight Thunder]

Comcast is already making steps towards IPv6: http://www.comcast6.net/ . The latest news entry on that site:

"Comcast and the Internet Society today announced that Comcast will participate in World IPv6 Day on June 8, 2011. We anticipate having our IPv6 trial users participate in this event, which will give them the opportunity to access many more sites natively over IPv6. In addition, we plan to have more of our websites available over IPv6."

It would be cool to have /. participate, even if they are hiding behind some ipv6/ipv4 proxy.

Re:Troubling for IPv6 adoption

[Midnight Thunder]

Switching is not a zero cost solution, but at some point sticking with IPv4 won't be either.

The solution, whether you switch now or in the future is to have a road map which outlines the risks and the steps. One of the simplest approaches is simply to start with the intranet border, concentrating on stuff in the DMZ, such as public facing webservers and using a proxy server to allow systems on your IPv4 intranet to to access external IPv6 base web servers. You won't ever eliminate risk, so the best thing to do is to find out how to minimise it.

Re:Troubling for IPv6 adoption

[davester666]

They'll wait until the internet goes to functioning so poorly for so many people, that they can demand a huge bailout from the gov't to fund the switch to IPv6.

It'll be "for the children".

Routing prevents "market" from working

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

It's official: IPv6 is for poor folk!

[Burz]

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.

Re:It's official: IPv6 is for poor folk!

[jd]

Economics theory refers to what you're talking about as a Giffen Good. As prices rise, so does the appeal and therefore so does the demand. The usual laws regarding supply-and-demand, etc, don't work. Prices will rise to what the market will bear, but as prices rise the desirability ensures that the markets will always bear just that little bit more. Which is why you get market bubbles in the first place. The greater the overpricing, the greater the prestige in owning the commodity.

Ultimately, all bubbles burst and when the IPv4 market bubble burts it is going to cause a LOT of pain because none of those caught in the bubble will have bothered preparing for IPv6. They'll assume that there'll always be some way to extend the range, some way to inflate the bubble still further. We've all seen similar posts on Slashdot even, where people should be smarter than that,

Why does everything have to be monetized?

[hawguy]

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?

Re:Why does everything have to be monetized?

[edjs]

ARIN can probably do so for blocks assigned under their authority. However, the same is not true for blocks handed out pre-ARIN (1997), which applies to most all of the huge unused blocks. And the demand for addresses means it'd be a stop-gap measure at best.

Re:Why does everything have to be monetized?

[Wrath0fb0b]

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?

Because I'm more comfortable with buyers and sellers coming to mutually-agreeable terms for the transfer rather than some centralized bureaucracy decided what constitutes "well-utilized" and seizing them against the consent of the owners. Besides the general dislike for top-down authority, the decentralized decision-making process will likely yield (overall) better results for determining what is "well-utilized" and what isn't based on the preferences of the stakeholders.

Money isn't the object of the game, it's just a convenient metric for keeping score -- in this case, the monetization of IP addresses is a reasonable (not perfect, but remember neither is ARIN -- we are choosing between two flawed solutions) way to determine whether or not a particular user needs or would part with it given the proper incentive. That is, it functions as a damn good way to do price discovery.

[ The astute will recognize that the initial distribution of IPs is patently absurd, largely, I would argue, because ARIN gave them out willy-nilly instead of charging $1/ea at the outset. To the extent that this damaged the prior allocation, I think ARIN should encourage (with incentives) technological measures to reclaim as much as possible funded out of current revenue. ]

Re:Why does everything have to be monetized?

[mysidia]

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?

Maybe ARIN can just reclaim blocks, that are not "well utilized", but you'll need to explain how you want it to work. Once you make a proposal, then ARIN can either accept it, or the community will have explained why the proposal cannot work.

If you want ARIN to reclaim blocks, subscribe to the policy mailing list ARIN-PPML and champion your policy proposal that will result in ARIN reclaiming blocks; follow the ARIN PDP to submit a formal proposal. Build consensus; if people on the mailing list agree with you, your proposal might become policy .

Be prepared to show up in person at an ARIN meeting to defend your proposal, explain, and justify, as required by the policy development process. You'll need to provide a proposal for exactly how the reclaiming process should work, what should be subject to reclamation, and address any major concerns.

If you can't even do that -- then the reason ARIN "can't" "just reclaim blocks", is that noone has provided a reasonable acceptable policy proposal that permits ARIN to accomplish it .

Re:Why does everything have to be monetized?

[grcumb]

Because I'm more comfortable with buyers and sellers coming to mutually-agreeable terms for the transfer rather than some centralized bureaucracy decided what constitutes "well-utilized" and seizing them against the consent of the owners. Besides the general dislike for top-down authority, the decentralized decision-making process will likely yield (overall) better results for determining what is "well-utilized" and what isn't based on the preferences of the stakeholders.

Then you should run, not walk, away from your computer and never access the Internet ever again.

I don't know if you're aware of it, but oligarchic cliques of so-called 'scientists' and 'researchers' from ivory tower elitist academic institutions have been controlling your Internet since its inception. Not too long ago, one man (one man) was responsible for ccTLD management. The hubris!

It's because of this cabal of anti-market conspirators that the Internet is such a ramshackle digital hodge-podge driven by socialist ideologies that allow people access to anything - anything! - for free.

Happily, the Captains of Commerce are working even as we speak to save us from this intolerable freedom to share.

Nothing underscores a commitment to IPv6

[bugs2squash]

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.

Willing to sell 8.67.53.09

[WillAffleckUW]

Half price if your name is Jenny.

Re:Willing to sell 8.67.53.09

[WillAffleckUW]

I've got a nice jail cell for you in GITMO then.

Re:Willing to sell 8.67.53.09

[WillAffleckUW]

dang, Jenny, I said not to change that number.

Re:I've got a large number of IPv6 addresses for s

[Kjella]

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.

Re:Have /21 pre arin block for sale

[jcurran]

If it''s registered in the ARIN service region, then its subject to policies developed by the community in this region for transfers. Go to www.arin.net and click on "Got IPv4 Addresses" for details.
Thanks!
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN

Re:I've got a large number of IPv6 addresses for s

[Kjella]

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.

legacy blocks

[jcurran]

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

Re:legacy blocks

[Bengie]

So a block was that grandfathered in loses its status once they try to change ownership?

Re:silly little app from 1997 doesn't support IPv6

[TaoPhoenix]

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!

Re:This is most horrible

[Electricity Likes Me]

Businesses aren't necessarily stupid (that said, there are plenty of stupid people in the world for a few of them to be). Even if they were monetizing IPv4, you could bet your arse that it means they've given the problem enough thought to realize that they actually do need an IPv6 action-plan of some kind, ideally dual-stack, "ready to go" since if you think you can sell your IPv4 addresses then you also realize at some point they really will deplete.

Re:I've got 253 IPs to sell in 192.168.1.x

[mysidia]

I could sell the entire 192.168.x.x domain. If it wasn't unroutable, therefore worthless on the inert net, that is...

Ok, fair enough, you get to sell 192.168.0.0/16. But I call dibs on 240.0.0.0/8.

Now selling at $15/ip address