[AusNOG] Prediction: Google et. al. may artificially penalise IPv4 clients

[Mark Smith]

Came across this tweet this morning, which is suggesting that Google
just purchased a /12 from Merit Network.

https://twitter.com/atoonk/status/858473247368593408


The cost per IPv4 address has been in the order of $10 each, so that
is a purchase in the order of $10M. That's a small amount of money for
Google, however in real terms, it is a high opportunity cost - $10M
will buy a lot of other things (staff, servers etc.).

What has happened is that ISPs that haven't deployed IPv6 have managed
to externalise the cost of not doing so to Google. Most if not all of
Google's services are reachable over IPv6, so they're not really doing
this because they themselves have no alternative way to provide access
to their services. Google are now receiving ~15% of their traffic over
IPv6:

https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html


Others who want to continue to grow and continue to provide their
services to IPv4 only clients will also have no choice but to buy more
IPv4 addresses. Other larger players will be able to afford to do so,
smaller players may not be able to.

At some point in the future I think there will be push back from
organisations who are being forced to or can't afford to buy IPv4
addresses because ISPs haven't deployed IPv6. They'll want to somehow
shift some or ideally all of the costs or consequences back onto the
organisations who are forcing them to buy more IPv4 addresses.

I think they're unlikely to try the service charge approach, although
from the side line, that might be both interesting and entertaining to
see if it works. I'd like to be there when an ISP receives the first
"IPv4 service charge" bill from an Internet service giant to see the
look on their face. Alternatively, per-customer service charge could
be used when the customer is paying for the service - e.g., it could
be a line item on the Netflix bill.

I think the only other lever these IPv4 purchasers have is to degrade
the IPv4 service - either artificially, or by choosing to avoid
capacity/resource investment in it, as it is a legacy service. ISP
customers call their ISP's helpdesk when ever anything goes wrong, and
that is where the cost of not deploying IPv6 will be incurred.