You're not proposing much of an alternative here, other than hoping that things are just going to sort-of carry on the way they always have. It would be nice to believe that this was going to happen, but personally, I don't view this as a realistic potential future.
I don't think anybody believes that things are always going to be the same. The point that I think ETNO is trying to stress is that RIPE should be careful to not extend its scope into areas that are normally the responsibility of government regulators and this includes market regulators. I think that we all want RIPE to continue the process of industry self regulation in IP addressing because the IPv4 shortage is just a temporary problem that will go away when IPv6 is widely deployed. Rather than focus on a shortage problem which RIPE can *NOT* solve, we should focus on other issues where RIPE is a valuable forum.
ETNO is correct in identifying that a market based addressing approach will attract lots of attention from forces which are - to be frank - unwanted and largely unhelpful. However, it must also be realised that an IP address market already exists where you can buy and sell IPv4 address space. And in a world where there is no longer a free supply of nearly zero-cost address space, this market will take off at high speed, regardless of whether or not the RIRs choose to engage in it.
This proposal enables the sale of IP addresses as property, even though it keeps the financial details secret. This legitimizes the position that IP addresses, and phone numbers are assests which can be bought and sold. But the policy as written places restrictions on the market which cannot be justified. In the first place, if IP addresses are an asset, then RIPE has no authority to say who can buy or sell these assets. Such restrictions can only be made by governments, and RIPE does not have that authority. I would rather see RIPE reject such proposals because it reinforces the message that IP addresses are not property which can be bought and sold.
Chaos is the most likely outcome if they are not given a mandate to be involved; RIRs will not have the community mandate to ensure that their databases of address holders continue to correspond with the ultimate users of the address space.
The only way that this chaotic situation could come to pass would be if many ISPs of a significant size, started to buy and sell IP addresses. ETNO contains many of the largest ISPs in Europe and they say that they will not do this. In addition, we are entering a period of IPv4 address shortage which means that most ISPs of any size will not have any IP addresses to sell unless they can get a price significantly above what they can earn by using the IP addresses to sell services. These are very real forces and they serve to limit chaos. I would prefer for RIPE to wait and see if there is increasing evidence of descent into chaos before taking actions like 2007-08.
Unless the RIRs are allowed to adapt to the de-facto methods of managing address space, they will become an irrelevant part of ipv4 address management,
Adaptation is good, just not in the directions defined by 2007-08. For instance, 2007-08 allows the addresses to be transferred without disclosure of any of the details of the transaction, for instance price paid. This lack of transparency would lead to addressing cartels and is not consistent with the principles of OPEN self regulation.
I don't think that there are very many people who really want an address space market; however, given the circumstances, it would seem to me and many others that it is the least bad of a small number of problematic ways of dealing with a severe constriction of IPv4 address space supply.
Seems to me that the least bad way is to deploy IPv6. There are at least two or three years left to do this, and it does not require replacing very much infrastructure. No need to panic. --Michael Dillon