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

[McTim]

On Nov 26, 2007 4:20 PM, Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch> wrote:
> 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.

Are you saying that there is mismanagement currently, or are you
referring to the classfull allocation era?


>
> > 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.


Unless they use a web interface.  I must be missing smt, why do you
need a public address for this?

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.

Again, I'm not getting you.  Are you talking about economically
underdeveloped areas in developed countries or economically
underdeveloped regions of the world.

If the former, well a market may develop in IP addresses at some
point, so that there may be tiered accounts offered by ISPs (with the
cheaper NAT accounts likely being taken up by customers with less
disposable income).  This market is not likely to last very long, as
IPv6 deployment will surge as address space declines, and every
home/customer will eventually have many hundreds or thousands of
addresses in the "Internet of Things".

If the latter, as I have mentioned before, the 2 youngest RIRs have
the slowest rate of address "usage", so Africa and Latin America may
have IP addresses to give away long after the USA and EU run out.

Another complicating factor is that when the IANA runs out of IPs, the
RIRs will still have them for a period, When the RIRs run out, LIRs
will still have them for a period.  This period could be days months
or even years.

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.

If a market develops, probably.  But why do you need a public IP
address per serever?  That's very old school thinking,  You can run
many many webservers using 1 IP.

>
> 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.
>

very true!

> 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.

What do you propose?

Since you are in Europe, perhaps this is a place to start researching
other proposals:

http://www.ripe.net/ripe/policies/proposals/
-- 
Cheers,

McTim
$ whois -h whois.afrinic.net mctim
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