[AusNOG] IPv4

[James Spenceley]

I didn't say I was that free market person or that was the purpose of any policy. There are side effects of any action or for that matter inaction, it would be responsible to just stick our heads in the sand and ignore them. Anyone involved in oversight has the job to consider all possible outcomes. I don't think you can think for a second that my PS: comment should be considered the main or even official APNIC position on the policy, I was noting a side effect as I believe it added relevance to the debate.

I'm the biggest free market guy there is (well maybe after you Bev :) but for APNIC's role you have to consider that free market economics simply don't work across a broad cross sections of economies and member's interests. That doesn't mean we can ignore their effects, which was the reason for the openness in that statement. 

On 03/03/2013, at 4:14 PM, Bevan Slattery <bevan at slattery.net.au> wrote:

> A free market would dictate that the entire space comes to auction regularly and pretending that a secondary market for those who were essentially gifted space of an globally important resource because of poor management is a red herring.
> 
> Surprising comment from what is supposed to be a not for profit organisation that is supposed to be concerned with the global resource management of Internet addresses.  
> 
> Completely counter to your argument earlier where you extolled the virtues of APNIC trying to reduce the cost for developing nations and yet in the next breath saying maybe capitalism dictating $50/ip is just fine and dandy.
> 
> Registries have failed and continue to fail in managing this address space.


IP has been broken since the early 80's and RFC 791.

Overtime we have all done out best to become aware of the problem, then manage that problem As time has gone on, each incarnation (internNIC, AUNIC, RIRs) have done a better and better job at. CIDR was a massive positive step, RFC2050 another one (most of the authors of those were RIR staff), the final /8 policy is allowing late comers to the game to get at least functional space. The RIRs have the biggest promoters of IPv4 exhaustion and IPv6 training/awareness. 

These are all pretty decent achievements, especially given the geopolitics involved. 

Have there been mistakes ? Of course, geez InterNIC giving IBM, HP, Apple, DEC, MIT, Ford, GE, Haliburton, US Postal etc) an entire /8 can't exactly be argued to be a positive but that would have simply bought us time, how much ? still nowhere near what is needed to migrate the worlds largest creation from one protocol to another.

Again, given that NextDC have their own IP space today is just one of the reason I point to the fact that your statement (and rather binary criticism) isn't particularly fair. 

What has failed was the design (complication, lack of backwards compatibility) and implementation of IPv6. The Industry globally has failed by only waiting till it was too late l(like 10 years to late) to start dealing with this problem. I can dig up ausnog posts of people who only a few years ago were saying that IPv4 exhaustion was simply a myth.

It's great to having this debate now, a good thing, but you can't deny the fact it is coming a little bit too late (but better than never). I don't think blaming APNIC or the RIRs is the right direction to take this, we are doing the best we can do for the broad set of "yous" we have (both new and future), we do this in a complicated environment that was broken before any of us even got involved. 

--
James