4 ms·

Public IPs are about $10/each on the market. Bah. mostly affected people that were getting addresses for "free". There are still a lot of "free" IPv4 address

Public IPs are about $10/each on the market. Bah. mostly affected people that were getting addresses for "free". There are still a lot of "free" IPv4 addresses out there. The problem is the cost of IPv4 addresses is not evenly applied. There's hoarding by some early adopters. E.g. I see that Stanford gave back its original /8 allocation, but MIT did not.[1] And why is Prudential Securities still sitting on a Class A block? If MIT or Prudential had to pay 16,777,216 * $10 per month for their IP addresses, you can bet that most would be returned within 48 hours! Even if they had to pay only $16 million per year, you can bet they'd return most of those addresses. A true capitalist solution to the IPv4 "shortage" never happened. That's why you have the current situation. Some organizations are sitting on huge swaths of unused addresses, others (the free market) are forced to pay $10 per month. There are about 4 billion possible IPv4 addresses (sure, some are reserved for e.g. multicast, but those could have been reclaimed). If each and every IPv4 address cost $10 per month, there would never have been a need for IPv6. Even if each and every IPv4 address cost only $1 per month (about $50 billion per year in aggregate), there would never have been a need for IPv6. Or at least IPv6 could have been postponed for a while and "done right". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...

pc2g4d 10y ago
Feels like real estate. The move to IPv6 could be seen as a socialist land redistribution scheme, since it imposes a cost upon the entire system (by requiring network upgrades) in order to make cheap "real estate" continually available to the masses.
- phicoh 10y ago
  There is no redistribution going on. Everybody who has IPv4 addresses now is free to keep them. If you want to compare to real estate, it is more like building a completely new city in the middle of nowhere. Initially the costs are high because you have to build new infrastructure. Initially, there is nobody there so there is no incentive to move to the new city. As the new city gets popular, everybody who has real estate in other cities may feel compelled to get real estate in the new city as well, but they don't have to give up their old property.
  - pc2g4d 10y ago
    So IPv6 is the Brasilia of Internet real estate :-)
CountSessine 10y ago
The market for IPv4 addresses is ultimately a band-aid solution because it affects routability. The more efficient such a market becomes at distributing addresses topologically, the less efficient packet routing becomes. IPv4 markets are a dead-end and are no substitute for a real solution.
- Dylan16807 10y ago
  The real problem is the old big networks, and it would be free to chop those up into /16 blocks, and cheap to chop them into /20s. There's not really an efficiency worry. It's a matter of putting in more megabytes of memory for the BGP tables. We could shatter the network into 15 million /24s and still be able to route everything efficiently.
  - tedunangst 10y ago
    There are more than a few old routers still in use, RAM maxed out, that are bumping into their limit. Whenever an aggregated net gets accidentally split, they start failing.
    - Dylan16807 10y ago
      On the other hand a lot of those failed at the same time two years ago when active BGP entries went over half a million, so now's a better time than usual to add a few entries. For reference, there's about 630k active BGP entries, with 50k more per year. It would only accelerate the death of those routers by six months, 24k entries, to split up everything larger than /16.
wmf 10y ago
Note that a secondhand IP address costs $10 to buy, not $10/month. IMO Postel's allocation of IP addresses can be rationalized from a capitalist viewpoint as a form of homesteading. Some people end up with windfall profits three decades later, but it's a small price to pay for a peacefully functioning market. Owning a $100M asset that's underutilized is already an economic incentive to free up addresses (just don't tell my company); a Georgist property tax on IP addresses would provide even more incentive but it would also likely cause a revolt. Since there are going to be 4B devices on the Internet soon if not already, talking about "there would never have been a need for IPv6" seems to imply the existence of an address-less underclass.
- PhantomGremlin 10y ago
  Note that a secondhand IP address costs $10 to buy, not $10/month. Yeah I really screwed up on that one!!! I got confused because often the retail price is in that range. E.g. Comcast Business will give you a static IP for $20/month.[1] But reading further, they will give you 13 extra IPs for $40/month, so clearly I didn't think it through. [1] I can't link directly to that information on Comcast's site, but it can be found here by clicking on Static IP pricing. https://business.comcast.com/internet/business-internet https://business.comcast.com/internet/business-internet
deleted 10y ago
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GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago
"Some people have much more than they need while others pay through the nose" sounds exactly like a true capitalist solution.

pc2g4d 10y ago

Feels like real estate. The move to IPv6 could be seen as a socialist land redistribution scheme, since it imposes a cost upon the entire system (by requiring network upgrades) in order to make cheap "real estate" continually available to the masses.

phicoh 10y ago
There is no redistribution going on. Everybody who has IPv4 addresses now is free to keep them. If you want to compare to real estate, it is more like building a completely new city in the middle of nowhere. Initially the costs are high because you have to build new infrastructure. Initially, there is nobody there so there is no incentive to move to the new city. As the new city gets popular, everybody who has real estate in other cities may feel compelled to get real estate in the new city as well, but they don't have to give up their old property.
- pc2g4d 10y ago
  So IPv6 is the Brasilia of Internet real estate :-)

CountSessine 10y ago

The market for IPv4 addresses is ultimately a band-aid solution because it affects routability. The more efficient such a market becomes at distributing addresses topologically, the less efficient packet routing becomes. IPv4 markets are a dead-end and are no substitute for a real solution.

Dylan16807 10y ago
The real problem is the old big networks, and it would be free to chop those up into /16 blocks, and cheap to chop them into /20s. There's not really an efficiency worry. It's a matter of putting in more megabytes of memory for the BGP tables. We could shatter the network into 15 million /24s and still be able to route everything efficiently.
- tedunangst 10y ago
  There are more than a few old routers still in use, RAM maxed out, that are bumping into their limit. Whenever an aggregated net gets accidentally split, they start failing.
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    On the other hand a lot of those failed at the same time two years ago when active BGP entries went over half a million, so now's a better time than usual to add a few entries. For reference, there's about 630k active BGP entries, with 50k more per year. It would only accelerate the death of those routers by six months, 24k entries, to split up everything larger than /16.

wmf 10y ago

Note that a secondhand IP address costs $10 to buy, not $10/month. IMO Postel's allocation of IP addresses can be rationalized from a capitalist viewpoint as a form of homesteading. Some people end up with windfall profits three decades later, but it's a small price to pay for a peacefully functioning market. Owning a $100M asset that's underutilized is already an economic incentive to free up addresses (just don't tell my company); a Georgist property tax on IP addresses would provide even more incentive but it would also likely cause a revolt. Since there are going to be 4B devices on the Internet soon if not already, talking about "there would never have been a need for IPv6" seems to imply the existence of an address-less underclass.

PhantomGremlin 10y ago
Note that a secondhand IP address costs $10 to buy, not $10/month. Yeah I really screwed up on that one!!! I got confused because often the retail price is in that range. E.g. Comcast Business will give you a static IP for $20/month.[1] But reading further, they will give you 13 extra IPs for $40/month, so clearly I didn't think it through. [1] I can't link directly to that information on Comcast's site, but it can be found here by clicking on Static IP pricing. https://business.comcast.com/internet/business-internet https://business.comcast.com/internet/business-internet

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

GFK_of_xmaspast 10y ago

"Some people have much more than they need while others pay through the nose" sounds exactly like a true capitalist solution.