Randy Bush wrote:
but then there is the bright idea of holding some in reserve so we can have some wonderful, very high stake, wars over who gets it and why. this scares me more than either of the above two scenarios. but i am sure we will get a lot of help divvying it up from the governments, itu, lawyers, and politicians. we will totally destroy what is left of cooperative internet stewardship in this process.
The pirates treasure of the last several /8's would prove irresistible for a high stakes scrap, you can easily imagine the lawyers circling the RIR's. I too hope no one wants to go there.
the slow versus sharp pain decision seems trivial when compared to the extreme pain of the wars of divvying up a reserve. let's not go there.
My concern is the that for many (most?) existing players the exhaustion of IPv4 space, whether real or artificial, is not a sharp enough pain for immediate migration. Many users are sitting on adequate allocations for their needs, in some cases historical and in others use of NAT has slowed or even halted growth in their use of IPv4 space.
The point here is that new entrants (regardless of the quality of their plans) and developing counties will bear the greatest pain from IPv4 exhaustion. They are also the least able to use IPv6 only as a solution.
I can imagine large countries in need of IPv4 space arbitrarily using space allocated to others, particularly if such space is 'invisible' or used by remote/small countries with little global clout. Sure this might not get globally routed but it could still be better than no space at all?
Regardless, when we do run out, there is lots of potential for fracturing the internet. The good news is that we have the opportunity to do something positive about it as five (or more) years available is adequate time to plan and deploy a bulk of a solution.
My concern with this proposal is that it seems to avoid the hard issues of a migration plan or an IPv4 trading market that will not only be necessary but I suspect will appear anyway (probably on eBay).
-- Robert Gray bob at brockhurst dot co dot nz