[rpd] Some thoughts, and some actions required

[Owen DeLong]

> On Feb 7, 2016, at 1:57 AM, jcadams0304 <jcadams0304 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi
> 
> Supply and demand.
> 
> If there is an need, and someone willing to pay for that need, there always supply.

This simply isn’t true. It’s a very naive interpretation of Ayn Rand at best.

For example, even if I were willing to pay $2,000,000 or $5,000,000 or any asking price, it would still be impossible for me to purchase a live King Island Emu.

There is no supply at any price.

While IPv4 addresses aren’t living and are not technically going to be extinct, there does eventually come a point where nobody is willing to part with them at any feasible price.

> Legalise only make things cheaper, does not change the fact about demand always will be satisfied regardless the legislation.

We are not talking about laws here. We are talking about the policies by which the registry is updated.

AfriNIC has 100% control over the update of the registry and that is all we can control with AfriNIC policies.

The idea that one is purchasing integers is absurd from the word go.

You cannot purchase or trade actual IP addresses. It’s like declaring a trademark on the number 4 and insisting that everyone pay you a royalty every time their mathematical efforts require the use of the number 4 in their calculations.

An IPv4 address is simply a 32-bit integer. The service provided by AfriNIC and the other cooperating RIRs and the IANA is a guarantee that your particular registration in their databases is unique to you and that they do not issue the same registration to more than one party at a time.

If you trade outside of the RIR system, then you give up any assurance of uniqueness within the system. You cannot trade within the system without following the policies of the system.

If you care about the addresses you are using being unique among those who choose to cooperate with the RIR system, then you will play by the rules and you will want your addresses properly registered to you within that system.

If you do not care to cooperate, then you are free to use any set of 32-bit integers that you wish and you must hope that you can somehow convince others to accept your idea that those particular numbers should be usable by you. Most ISPs choose (for the good of the internet and for the sanity of their business) to cooperate with the existing RIR system and are unlikely to accept (at least in the long run) routes advertised that do not line up with their registration.

> 1930s US banned alcohol, the only effectiveness of such legislation is making everyone supplies alcohol happy because now same product ten times the price.

Actually, alcohol during prohibition in the US was cheaper than after prohibition was repealed. However, it did reduce competition and limit supply to an oligopoly. Also, because it was illegal, there were no health and safety controls on the products being distributed and a number of other problems.

It is much the same way now with prostitution in 49 out of 50 united States. The primary consequence of the ban on prostitution is that the prostitutes have no recourse when they are abused by their clientele because they cannot go to the police for fear of getting into trouble themselves. Contrast this with Columbia, where prostitution is legal and the secret service agents got in trouble because when they did not pay, the prostitute(s) were able to go to the police and make a proper complaint and have them dealt with according to the law.

However, again, this is not a matter of law. This is a matter of policy within a system of voluntary cooperation. There are significant differences between these two frameworks.

> According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_States>, doctors made over 40m USD(600M USD in today's money) in whiskey prescription. Mafia group made much more, in fact, legalise Alcohol later on was opposed and lobbied continuing the ban by mafia group who selling alcohols. 

Sure, but let’s compare that to the alcohol industry in the US in 2014 (the latest numbers I could quickly get)… $600m is NOTHING compared to today’s $211.6 billion.

That’s almost 4000x the market during prohibition. To put that into perspective for IP addresses, if the entire IPv4 unicast address space (roughly 3.2 billion addresses) could be available under some set of transfer policies (which is highly unlikely), then the total available without transfer policies would likely be closer to 7.8 million or roughly half of a /8.

> Same goes for the transfer market, if you think anyone selling IP is evil, then forbidding a transfer policy only make the price higher for them to sell, in which, make the person who selling it happier.

This has not been what has been shown to be the case elsewhere. In the ARIN region, where brokers are constantly pushing to reduce the restrictions on transfers, we are seeing that a very low percentage of buyers (below detection) are willing to purchase number resources without the purchase being recorded in the ARIN database. This isn’t a matter of evil vs. good, it’s a simple fact of how the system works. Because ISPs generally don’t want to accept routes of unverifiable provenance and the most widely accepted source of information about provenance is the RIR databases, addresses quickly lose their value without the ability to correctly register them.

> Policy only do so such to the reality, same goes for laws, there is not a single country on this planet you can not buy weed, while only a few legalised them.

Sure, but you don’t need anyone else’s cooperation to make your use of weed viable. Once you have the weed, you can smoke it entirely on your own if you so choose.

IP addresses are different. They are of no use whatsoever unless you can get someone else to accept the idea that they are yours to advertise and that you should receive the packets with them in the destination field. If you can’t achieve that, then there is no reason to buy addresses… Just make up random 32-bit integers of your liking and use those. They will do you just as much good and cost far less. There’s no law against it.

So let’s keep things in a more accurate perspective and realize that IP addresses are neither prostitutes nor intoxicants and the use of them requires cooperation of many more third parties than the use of either prostitutes or intoxicants. As such, unregistered IP addresses are of almost no practical value. Thus, RIR policies are actually more effective so long as they do not go so far that a substantial portion of the internet seeks alternative forms of registration.


Owen


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