On 29 okt 2007, at 16:19, David Conrad wrote:
About half the ~ 40 legacy /8 assignments don't show up in the routing table.
Which, of course, means precisely nothing.
The value of an IP address is the ability to receive packets from elsewhere addressed to it. Without a presence in a routing table someplace, that doesn't happen so the IP address is of no value. Better give it back so someone else who can instill it with exactly that value in that case...
How much do you think a reclaim programme would cost to run?
Don't know; don't care too much. Let the people who want the addresses pay for it.
I thought you didn't want a market?
There is no market in passports. Doesn't mean you get it for free.
Trading something that's in demand but has no supply will lead to hoarding, reducing availability or at the very least making it unpredictable.
The address space in question is already allocated, hence unavailable. The question is how to incent folks to put their "allocated but unused" address space back into play.
Your assumption is that the value of having more addresses automatically outweighs any negative consequences from having a market. It requires herculian effort to keep the up-and-coming economies happy with the way the internet is currently "run" (if there is such a thing). What is the developing world going to say when they have to pay rich American companies for address space--address space that those companies got for free? What if a slow trickle of expensive IPv4 addresses is just enough to keep people from moving to IPv6, but at the same time stiffling the industry both technically by deeper and deeper layers of NAT and economically because it takes longer and longer and costs more and more to get new IP addresses for new businesses? There are STILL people that refuse to bother implementing IPv6 in their products, making it that much harder for their customers to adopt IPv6 in the next three years that we can reasonably sure about having current levels of IPv4 availability. Anything that these people can use as an excuse to wait even longer is extremely harmful.