Am 02.06.26 um 20:15 schrieb Joachim Tingvold via members-discuss:
On 2 Jun 2026, at 10:20, Chano Klinck Andersen wrote:
It’s interesting how often the assumption is made that IPv4 addresses will be returned if they cost more to hold on to.
Well, I don’t see how such a change would make it worse than what we see today?
That's an easy one to answer: IPv4 dealers will slap the extra cost onto their sales price, so as to keep their profit margin. Their buyers will continue to buy from *them*, rather than waiting to obtain IPv4 space from RIPE, because the price and delay comparisons between the two have merely shifted, not changed fundamentally. Those who "sit on unused address space" will be more tempted than ever to sell it - on the market, not handing it to RIPE, of course - for the increased price. Which they may or may not find a *compelling* reason to. (Sure, if you were to *quintuple* the price in one fell swoop ...) End result, IPv4 has gotten that much more expensive for *everyone*, regardless of how much they're an upstanding Internet citizen opposed to the market approach. In a nutshell, you *cannot* make a resource cheaper or easier to obtain by slapping an extra fee onto a part of its lifecycle, whether you succeed in affecting *all* users that way or just a part of them. If that were possible, gasoline taxation, carbon certificates etc. etc. would be threatened not to work as intended. Discuss IPv4 pricing as a means to redistribute the cost of RIPE among the members, if you want, but it's *not* going to make new addresses rain down on said members. You need a means of *actually forcefully taking the limited resource away from "abusers"* to succeed with that, and RIPE is not and does not want to be that, at least not according to their recent statements. Kind regards, -- Jochen Bern Systemingenieur Binect GmbH