[governance] Why IPv4 address depletion matters (was Re: Reinstate...)

[Norbert Bollow]

Veni Markovski <veni at veni.com> wrote:

> Of the many issues around the Internet, the DNS and esp. the IP
> addresses are not on the priority list of anyone except people with
> some commercial interest, scientific researchers, professionals. The
> end user does not care about them.

Possibly because they are not informed about how any mismanagement of
these resources contributes, or is likely to contribute in the future,
to problems that are truly painful for them.

> That actually is the big pain of some people here - that regardless
> of what they say, and how loud, the users still don't care about
> ICANN, but about how much they pay for what kind of service.

In my opinion, price of internet access cannot really be discussed
independently of the question of economics of how having internet
access will result in sufficient economic value creation that the
infrastructure costs can thereby get paid for.

Now the problem with IP address depletion is that unless progress is
made with the transition to IPv6, there will in a few years be two
fundamentally different types of internet access.  "Consumer" internet
access will be behind several layers of NAT, which allows to "surf
the web", use email, etc, but which does not make it possible for
businesses to allow customers to interact with their IT systems.  In
economically underdeveloped areas, only this kind of internet access
will be available at all, making the already now difficult problem of
economic development in such areas even worse.  By contrast, there
are enough IPv4 address numbers that businesses in economic centres
and in the rich countries will always be able to get fixed IP addresses
for their webservers.

I believe that in principle, the internet could help a lot to create a
"digital opportunity" in those regions of the world which are currently
suffering from lack of economic development.

However, I think that it is quite possible that this digital
opportunity may be lost to a significant extent due to not paying
enough attention to the IPv4 address depletion issue.

Greetings,
Norbert.


-- 
Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch>                      http://Norbert.ch
President of the Swiss Internet User Group SIUG    http://SIUG.ch
Working on establishing a non-corrupt and
truly /open/ international standards organization  http://OpenISO.org
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