

IPv4 Address Market Takes Off - oxplot
http://research.dyn.com/2015/04/ipv4-address-market-takes-off/

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tjgq
So in what way exactly does the Internet as a whole benefit from allowing IPv4
addresses to be traded in a free market?

This is a honest question. I would like to know how we avoid ending up in a
world where a few large companies control all the available IPv4 addresses
(which they don't really need) so they can rent them to the rest of us at
exhorbitant prices.

IPv6 won't render the problem moot - it's likely that IPv4 addresses will
remain a necessity for globally reachable services for years to come,
regardless of IPv6 adoption.

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gardarh
I always viewed the cause for slow IPv6 adoption as a lack of incentive -
while IPv4 addresses are effectively free then where is the ROI in building an
IPv6 infrastructure?

I guess that when IPv4 addresses are traded in a free market it is easier to
realise the cost of not adopting IPv6, eventually leading to a faster adoption
(which is a good thing for everyone, NAT is essentially making the internet a
lot less cooler place than it could be).

Also, what would the alternative be? Just not handing out IPv4 blocks to new
players and telling them "tough luck"? Or a lottery? I really don't know a
better alternative to a free market.

~~~
tjgq
Totally agree with you in that IPv6 and the end of NATs are great for the
Internet.

My honest (though possibly unpopular) opinion is that the incentive should
have been given years ago through government intervention, by legally
compelling ISPs to provide IPv6 connectivity to their customers. If most of
the Internet had been switched to IPv6 by now, no bidding war over IPv4
addresses would need to take place.

Naturally, it's moot to point out what could have been done and wasn't. But I
think this illustrates a limitation of market-based incentives: they seem to
work well on the short term, but have a tendency to fail on the long one. Slow
IPv6 adoption is, in my view, a market failure that should have been corrected
through government intervention.

~~~
hackuser
> Totally agree with you in that IPv6 and the end of NATs are great for the
> Internet.

I can see the advantages, but do I want my devices to have publicly routable
addresses? I prefer that the public Internet doesn't know the exist and can't
easily contact them without receiving a recent outbound connection. (Perhaps I
missing an obvious solution here?)

~~~
tjgq
What you want is called a firewall.

There seems to be this common misconception that a firewall and a NAT box are
the same thing, but they're not. It just happens that most NAT implementations
also work as firewalls (though not the other way round).

Even if you don't have a firewall, the odds of someone discovering your IPv6
address by chance (i.e. without you communicating with them first) are
incredibly low. Common IPv6 deployment practice is to delegate at least a /56
prefix to each end user, so your device gets an address chosen at random from
2^72 possibilities. You can even hop into a different address every few
minutes for added security (some IPv6 stacks do this).

So please don't spread the misconception that IPv6 is somehow less secure than
IPv4! :)

~~~
hackuser
This is a bit condescending and an overreaction. I know well what firewalls
and NAT are, and I asked a question, I didn't assert any misconception.

I'll address the technical issues in my response to the other commenters
response.

~~~
tjgq
I certainly did not mean to be condescending. I offer my apologies if my post
came across as so.

~~~
hackuser
Thanks.

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bluedevil2k
This is actually the opposite of what I'm seeing in the American IPv4 market.
I run a broker company (ipv4hub.com) with access to millions of IP addresses
and can't sell any large blocks at all (large block being a /18 which is about
16,000 addresses).

EDIT: Fixed the number of addresses in a /18

~~~
JoachimSchipper
Interesting. Of course, the US, as the inventor, has quite a _lot_ of IP
space; perhaps it's just that?

~~~
tptacek
Why would they be limited to selling within the US?

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spullara
The problem is that they designed IPv6 not to be backwards compatible with
IPv4 in any meaningful way. Unless you forbid IPv4 traffic on the internet
everyone is going to have to build all software for both for the foreseeable
future. If everything works with both, why should you build against the new
spec at all?

~~~
tjgq
Given that worldwide Internet adoption is still growing strong, it is
conceivable that sooner or later a significant number of endpoints will only
have IPv6 connectivity, or that their IPv4 connectivity will be limited to a
private address behind a carrier-grade NAT.

Another point to consider is that there are things you can do with IPv6
connectivity that are very difficult/costly, or outright impossible, in NATted
IPv4 land.

Personally, I'm waiting for the next generation of peer-to-peer protocols that
make use of end-to-end IPv6 connectivity instead of hole-punching and proxying
through third-parties. (Case study: ever thought how ridiculous it is that in
2015 it's still non-trivial to send a large file to someone over the Internet
without using some sort of storage service?)

It's plausible that one of those new applications could end up being the
"killer app" for IPv6.

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jpatokal
The list of /8 block owners makes interesting reading:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_address_blocks)

The US Army in various guises controls vast swathes of address space, but
there are also lots of corporations with a 256th of IPv4 all to themselves:
Halliburton, GE, Prudential, Ford, etc. MIT also appears to be the last
university still hanging onto their own block.

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im2w1l
I have a specific IP address I want to purchase. Is this possible?

~~~
matthewarkin
You couldn't just get a single IP address, you'd have to buy a routable block
that contains that IP address, which while I believe technically is a /28, in
practice is a /24 (256 addresses)

~~~
tptacek
Can you generally advertise a /24 now? I thought the filters were rougher than
that.

~~~
phil21
/24's are generally considered globally routable these days, and have been for
quite some time. I suppose there are still some providers out there who filter
them, but we'd both be showing our age if we speculated on those names :)

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JoshGlazebrook
Just curious, how many ip addresses does Amazon have for their cloud services?
What would happen if they ran out and were unable to obtain more in a timely
manner?

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ertemplin
Back in November 2014, there were at least 10,130,200 IP addresses in the EC2
range. So there are potentially way more than that today due to growth of EC2
and IP addresses required for other AWS services.

Source: [http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-ip-ranges-
json/](http://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-ip-ranges-json/)

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smtucker
Why would one want IPv4 address space so badly?

Is it so you can communicate with servers or clients that don't facilitate any
form of IPv6?

~~~
tptacek
Yes, with "servers or clients that don't facilitate any form of IPv6" being a
pretty good description of "the internet at large".

