Internet and e-mail policy and practice
including Notes on Internet E-mail


2011
Months
May

Click the comments link on any story to see comments or add your own.


Subscribe to this blog


RSS feed


Home :: Internet


15 May 2011

IP addresses as money Internet

It's no secret that the supply of IPv4 addresses, on which the Internet has been based since the dawn of digital time, is rapidly running out. The official replacement is much larger IPv6 addresses, but I can report from experience that the task of switching is not trivial, and for a long time there will be a lot of the net that's only on IPv4. So once the initial supply of IPv4 addresses run out, and the only way to get some is to buy them from someone else, what will the market be like?

The IP address market is sort of like banking on a planet where there is only a single gold mine containing 4 billion ounces of gold, run by the central bank, and the planet experiences severe deflation as the bank runs out of gold and can't issue any more coins. I suppose one could try to analogize NAT (using private addresses on small networks like the one in your house) to fractional banking. We'd apply Gresham's law to private RFC 1918 addresses ("bad addresses drive out good"), but that'd be a stretch.

What the bank analogy doesn't capture is the routing costs. The reason that pure IP address markets won't work is the routing externalities. Every time someone breaks a block of IP addresses into multiple pieces, that imposes costs on all the operators of the large routers that need to keep a route to every chunk of active IP addresses. But there is no workable way to impose per-route charges on end networks, nor to arrange to pay the money to the router operators to subsidize the costs that all the routes impose.

I suppose it might be possible for network peering arrangements to take into account the number of routes used by each peer as well as what they currently do, the amount of traffic in each direction. I'm not aware of anyone doing this, but I don't claim to be totally au courant on peering negotiations.


posted at: 21:27 :: permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments
posted at: 21:27 ::
permanent link to this entry :: 0 comments

comments...        (Jump to the end to add your own comment)

Add your comment...

Note: all comments require an email address to send a confirmation to verify that it was posted by a person and not a spambot. The comment won't be visible until you click the link in the confirmation. Unless you check the box below, which almost nobody does, your email won't be displayed, and I won't use it for other purposes.

 
Name:
Email: you@wherever (required, for confirmation)
Title: (optional)
Comments:
Show my Email address
Save my Name and Email for next time

Topics


My other sites

Who is this guy?

Airline ticket info

Taughannock Networks

Other blogs

CAUCE
It turns out you don’t need a license to hunt for spam.
4 days ago

A keen grasp of the obvious
Italian Apple Cake
562 days ago

Related sites

Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail

Network Abuse Clearinghouse



© 2005-2020 John R. Levine.
CAN SPAM address harvesting notice: the operator of this website will not give, sell, or otherwise transfer addresses maintained by this website to any other party for the purposes of initiating, or enabling others to initiate, electronic mail messages.