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While I appreciate the concept behind this. It's all just slapping duct tape on a sinking ship rather than stepping over to the brand shiny new ship thats right

While I appreciate the concept behind this. It's all just slapping duct tape on a sinking ship rather than stepping over to the brand shiny new ship thats right next to us. Was/Is there an overabundance of IPv4 space that was reserved or allocated in silly ways? Yes. But we've got IPv6 now. It works, we know it works. Does IPv6 require some changes in assumption? Yes, but you start clean with those. You can test really quickly if IPv6 works or not, make sure your IP parsing tools and ETL work... it's not a huge deal once your network supports it (which for most people, it is already). However, changing assumptions around IPv4 addresses that have been baked into software, hardware and everything in between for the last 40 years? Ouch. Just look at Cloudflare and 1.0.0.0/24 network. Gigabits of junk traffic, why? Because people had spent a long time assuming that it'd never be used. https://www.zdnet.com/article/1-1-1-1-cloudflares-new-dns-attracting-gigabits-per-second-of-rubbish/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/1-1-1-1-cloudflares-new-dns-at... Imagine what that would look like if it was say... 127.127.127.127 or any popular various in the 127/8 space. They'd not only be able to receive huge amounts of what should have been private traffic... a malicious party could also SEND you huge amounts of traffic that your systems, today, assume is perfectly safe and internal only whitelist goodness. I'd guess if this goes through, a lot of companies, for safety sake, will simply blackhole 127/8 and 0/8 at the edge. Simple and effective... except for all the poor users/services who end up using those IP's and can't get to half the internet.

xenadu02 5y ago
Well the 240/4 block does represent around 6.7% of the total IPv4 address space (268 million addresses) and is already supported by almost every OS except Windows. That's a significant chunk of addresses that can buy some breathing room for cases where IPv4 addresses are truly necessary while greatly reducing or possibly eliminating a market for selling such addresses for a time - a positive in my view. If I had to pick one proposal I'd say that one is the most "bang for the buck" and probably the only one worth implementing. The others don't represent enough addresses to be worth doing - for the same reason trying to take addresses away from early adopters who got Class A blocks doesn't make sense: any individual block is "only" 16 million addresses so even if you could take them all back (you can't) put together they are smaller than this single /4 being proposed. The other proposals similarly represent fairly small allocations (eg /8) or are scattered among all networks (the .0 multicast address) so they won't make much of a difference. But making 268 million new addresses available? That seems worth doing!
- fomine3 5y ago
  Agreed. This is just a mitigation so it should mitigate correct problem. IMO it's a problem that new service operators can't get enough IPv4 addresses for cheaper. It's inequality. If 240./4 become available, ICANN should sell cheaper (or free) for relatively new service operators especially in developing world, rather than tech giants in the US.
  - ev1 5y ago
    APNIC actually provide discounts if you are from a developing economy. However, in practice, I see huge amounts of abuse from this, people registering space for half the price then immediately leasing it for out of country use, etc.
- p1mrx 5y ago
  > while greatly reducing or possibly eliminating a market for selling such addresses for a time I would argue that this is harmful. IPv4 addresses becoming expensive is what's finally convincing the bean counters to care about IPv6 adoption. The IPv4 market has effects analogous to a carbon tax on climate change.
  - franga2000 5y ago
    The difference with a tax of course is that the money goes into the pockets of traders instead of anyone who, well, does anything beneficial. A tax not only makes bad behavior expensive, but funds remediation efforts (a carbon tax usually funds renewables research, for example). Imagine how quickly we'd roll out IPv6 if IPv4 net owners had to start paying a small yearly fee which would be collected in a big fund that ISPs and other infrastructure providers could request grants from to finance their IPv6 transition.

xenadu02 5y ago

Well the 240/4 block does represent around 6.7% of the total IPv4 address space (268 million addresses) and is already supported by almost every OS except Windows. That's a significant chunk of addresses that can buy some breathing room for cases where IPv4 addresses are truly necessary while greatly reducing or possibly eliminating a market for selling such addresses for a time - a positive in my view. If I had to pick one proposal I'd say that one is the most "bang for the buck" and probably the only one worth implementing. The others don't represent enough addresses to be worth doing - for the same reason trying to take addresses away from early adopters who got Class A blocks doesn't make sense: any individual block is "only" 16 million addresses so even if you could take them all back (you can't) put together they are smaller than this single /4 being proposed. The other proposals similarly represent fairly small allocations (eg /8) or are scattered among all networks (the .0 multicast address) so they won't make much of a difference. But making 268 million new addresses available? That seems worth doing!

fomine3 5y ago
Agreed. This is just a mitigation so it should mitigate correct problem. IMO it's a problem that new service operators can't get enough IPv4 addresses for cheaper. It's inequality. If 240./4 become available, ICANN should sell cheaper (or free) for relatively new service operators especially in developing world, rather than tech giants in the US.
- ev1 5y ago
  APNIC actually provide discounts if you are from a developing economy. However, in practice, I see huge amounts of abuse from this, people registering space for half the price then immediately leasing it for out of country use, etc.
p1mrx 5y ago
> while greatly reducing or possibly eliminating a market for selling such addresses for a time I would argue that this is harmful. IPv4 addresses becoming expensive is what's finally convincing the bean counters to care about IPv6 adoption. The IPv4 market has effects analogous to a carbon tax on climate change.
- franga2000 5y ago
  The difference with a tax of course is that the money goes into the pockets of traders instead of anyone who, well, does anything beneficial. A tax not only makes bad behavior expensive, but funds remediation efforts (a carbon tax usually funds renewables research, for example). Imagine how quickly we'd roll out IPv6 if IPv4 net owners had to start paying a small yearly fee which would be collected in a big fund that ISPs and other infrastructure providers could request grants from to finance their IPv6 transition.