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I've been doing a moderate amount of research on getting an ASN and ipv4/6 blocks so I can BYOIP and host third-party services without being locked into the clo

I've been doing a moderate amount of research on getting an ASN and ipv4/6 blocks so I can BYOIP and host third-party services without being locked into the cloud provider I was using at the time the third-party configured DNS. That has led me down various rabbit holes in which I started learning how the Internet actually works. IMO the Internet actually sucks ass Why is there so much bureaucracy and cost involved for someone to own an IP address? I should be able to connect to the network and acquire an IP address as easily as I can buy a merckle-tree-backed pointer to an IPFS image, or vote in a US election. Why do I have to pay hundreds of dollars for Internet Numbers conjured from thin air by a US nonprofit to be resold by a RIR? How fucking moronic is it that IPV4 was created with substantially less capacity than there were humans on Earth, got adopted, wasn't immediately fixed or abandoned once it became obvious that the Internet would be used globally, was irresponsibly allocated, introduced various unofficial but consequential practices (eg NAT), ran out and got expensive, and STILL is widely used alongside ipv6. What is the point of having a centralized system for governance centered around ICANN/IANA when they are so wildly inefficient and incapable of governing? Fuck 2000€ these are freaking made up numbers that I should be able to buy for pennies with an email address, government ID, and credit card.

jasonvorhe 1y ago
Just look at the origins of each of these technologies and the times in which they were created and you have all the answers you need. I'm really surprised whenever I read takes like these.
- weitendorf 1y ago
  Of course everything is a product of its time, and in 1999 or any other world where the Internet is more of a cool new thing than serious business, it makes sense. But that was 26 years ago. I am pretty sure the guys charging hundreds of dollars for IP addresses that cost them nothing to produce should be able to set up stripe, an identity verification product, and otherwise automate onboarding. Also, instead of writing giant process documents and slow-walking such wildly difficult problems as "allow domains to end in .cool" through infinitely nested committees they could try wielding their supreme governance over Who Owns Numbers And Names by killing off IPv4. As long as ICANN/IANA remain in charge of Internet governance and operate with >$100mm budgets [0] "it made sense 25 years ago" is not a valid excuse IMO. [0] https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/fy24-funding-source-04sep24-en.pdf https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/fy24-funding-sou...
  - jve 1y ago
    Just a little correction per IPv4 wikipedia [1]: Introduction 1981; 44 years ago [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4
    - tracker1 1y ago
      I was going to look up the same... I thought it was a little older than that... it's worth remembering that in 1981 there was no DNS yet, and even for dialup BBSes there were only a handful in the entire country as Hayes modems were new that year. Hell, for years a lot of business email services were dialup, grab packets, send packets and read/reply offline. This is the same year the IBM PC was first released, and many people felt that would only see fairly limited sales. It wound up selling over 20x projections. Nobody at the time really thought there would be a need for even more addresses. Not to mention the additional overhead of a wider network on the hardware at the time.
47282847 1y ago
Sounds like you might want to dig into what these organizations do for its members besides assignment and management (not sale! you cannot own IP addresses) of shared number resources, to get a better understanding of their membership fees! I am a big fan of RIPE as an organization and appreciate their work (and less so of ARIN but I have little exposure). Financial reports are public, and fee structures including salaries and all work areas and work groups are decided and voted on by its members. The highest body of the RIPE non-profit is the general assembly. I manage two RIPE LIRs, and signup was not more work than joining any other member association. There is an annual invoice, and various payment processor options for that. I wouldn’t want it to be less “bureaucratic“ since I benefit from their processes and transparency. If they didn’t guard it, all of it would be in the hands of a Musk-like soulless broken person hiding behind a tax-evading corporate structure with zero accountability. No thank you.
- johnecheck 1y ago
  As if our only options between dysfunctional bureaucracy and corporate absolutism. It's not the formal processes and openness I take issue with. IPV4's ubiquity and the damage it does (funneling real money away from all of us towards ISPs) is a failure of governance. Though in a way it's not. It's failing me, but it wasn't designed to represent me. It's failing our species, but it wasn't designed to represent us. Who do you think it was designed to represent? The outcome speaks for itself.
  - weitendorf 1y ago
    I for one love living in a world where ISPs, middlemen, and random internet jackpot winners were able to extract rent through a highly equitable, transparent governance model AND meet yearly at the Hilton.
- weitendorf 1y ago
  > not sale! you cannot own IP addresses True, but I mean, I don't own my own body either I suppose, I am just borrowing its particles from the rest of the universe. That's only a useful distinction to make if you plan on killing me. My personal situation is probably not very representative of most Internet users or entities interacting with the organizations that control the Internet, but I think as wireless technology improves and end-users' ability and incentive to self-host grows, they will run into the same problems that I do. Bottom line: I don't want to spend unreasonable amounts of time and money dealing with the idiosyncracies of the Internet Protocol and related technology, when I'm trying to do something that should be easy, like get an IP address that I can move between ISPs and cloud providers, or run an internet service from my home. It just feels incredibly wasteful to have to pay significant amounts of money to rent a number when it should be possible to claim or cheaply register one of 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 such numbers. Then once I nut up and pay for a small slice of the infinitely many numbers available, I have to deal with completely avoidable, godawful technical debt that only exists because the people I'm supposedly paying to govern me were so lazy that they allowed an obvious slow-motion trainwreck to play out with IPv4 over decades. They're still so lazy or cowardly or incompetent that after 20 years IPv6 availability is still only around 50%. Good thing there is an unnecessarily complicated organizational model between ICANN/IANA/RIR so that everybody can point fingers somewhere else. I don't want to pay for conferences and subcommittees and elaborate ceremonies for electing Vice Treasurers of RIRs, nor do I want to play tamagotchi with ranges of numbers. I just want a fucking number that allows other Internet users to connect with the stuff I put behind that number. I would prefer a more functional system for acquiring said numbers than one that feels all warm and fuzzy about letting the people profiting off renting numbers elect the leaders of the organizations with the authority to end rentiership of the numbers.

jasonvorhe 1y ago

Just look at the origins of each of these technologies and the times in which they were created and you have all the answers you need. I'm really surprised whenever I read takes like these.

weitendorf 1y ago
Of course everything is a product of its time, and in 1999 or any other world where the Internet is more of a cool new thing than serious business, it makes sense. But that was 26 years ago. I am pretty sure the guys charging hundreds of dollars for IP addresses that cost them nothing to produce should be able to set up stripe, an identity verification product, and otherwise automate onboarding. Also, instead of writing giant process documents and slow-walking such wildly difficult problems as "allow domains to end in .cool" through infinitely nested committees they could try wielding their supreme governance over Who Owns Numbers And Names by killing off IPv4. As long as ICANN/IANA remain in charge of Internet governance and operate with >$100mm budgets [0] "it made sense 25 years ago" is not a valid excuse IMO. [0] https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/fy24-funding-source-04sep24-en.pdf https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/fy24-funding-sou...
- jve 1y ago
  Just a little correction per IPv4 wikipedia [1]: Introduction 1981; 44 years ago [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4
  - tracker1 1y ago
    I was going to look up the same... I thought it was a little older than that... it's worth remembering that in 1981 there was no DNS yet, and even for dialup BBSes there were only a handful in the entire country as Hayes modems were new that year. Hell, for years a lot of business email services were dialup, grab packets, send packets and read/reply offline. This is the same year the IBM PC was first released, and many people felt that would only see fairly limited sales. It wound up selling over 20x projections. Nobody at the time really thought there would be a need for even more addresses. Not to mention the additional overhead of a wider network on the hardware at the time.

47282847 1y ago

Sounds like you might want to dig into what these organizations do for its members besides assignment and management (not sale! you cannot own IP addresses) of shared number resources, to get a better understanding of their membership fees! I am a big fan of RIPE as an organization and appreciate their work (and less so of ARIN but I have little exposure). Financial reports are public, and fee structures including salaries and all work areas and work groups are decided and voted on by its members. The highest body of the RIPE non-profit is the general assembly. I manage two RIPE LIRs, and signup was not more work than joining any other member association. There is an annual invoice, and various payment processor options for that. I wouldn’t want it to be less “bureaucratic“ since I benefit from their processes and transparency. If they didn’t guard it, all of it would be in the hands of a Musk-like soulless broken person hiding behind a tax-evading corporate structure with zero accountability. No thank you.

johnecheck 1y ago
As if our only options between dysfunctional bureaucracy and corporate absolutism. It's not the formal processes and openness I take issue with. IPV4's ubiquity and the damage it does (funneling real money away from all of us towards ISPs) is a failure of governance. Though in a way it's not. It's failing me, but it wasn't designed to represent me. It's failing our species, but it wasn't designed to represent us. Who do you think it was designed to represent? The outcome speaks for itself.
- weitendorf 1y ago
  I for one love living in a world where ISPs, middlemen, and random internet jackpot winners were able to extract rent through a highly equitable, transparent governance model AND meet yearly at the Hilton.
weitendorf 1y ago
> not sale! you cannot own IP addresses True, but I mean, I don't own my own body either I suppose, I am just borrowing its particles from the rest of the universe. That's only a useful distinction to make if you plan on killing me. My personal situation is probably not very representative of most Internet users or entities interacting with the organizations that control the Internet, but I think as wireless technology improves and end-users' ability and incentive to self-host grows, they will run into the same problems that I do. Bottom line: I don't want to spend unreasonable amounts of time and money dealing with the idiosyncracies of the Internet Protocol and related technology, when I'm trying to do something that should be easy, like get an IP address that I can move between ISPs and cloud providers, or run an internet service from my home. It just feels incredibly wasteful to have to pay significant amounts of money to rent a number when it should be possible to claim or cheaply register one of 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 such numbers. Then once I nut up and pay for a small slice of the infinitely many numbers available, I have to deal with completely avoidable, godawful technical debt that only exists because the people I'm supposedly paying to govern me were so lazy that they allowed an obvious slow-motion trainwreck to play out with IPv4 over decades. They're still so lazy or cowardly or incompetent that after 20 years IPv6 availability is still only around 50%. Good thing there is an unnecessarily complicated organizational model between ICANN/IANA/RIR so that everybody can point fingers somewhere else. I don't want to pay for conferences and subcommittees and elaborate ceremonies for electing Vice Treasurers of RIRs, nor do I want to play tamagotchi with ranges of numbers. I just want a fucking number that allows other Internet users to connect with the stuff I put behind that number. I would prefer a more functional system for acquiring said numbers than one that feels all warm and fuzzy about letting the people profiting off renting numbers elect the leaders of the organizations with the authority to end rentiership of the numbers.