I seriously liking the idea of some APNIC colleagues "no more v4 policy from today on".

All those growth thing, when was last time you saw a property developer complaint to Gov that he can not grow his business because he can not get free land?

No one would be stopped doing business because of 10% more expenditure(in which at today's v4 price, not even 10%). Naming any possible business form needing IP address, I fairly confident all of them, IP won't count even 5% of their total expenditure. (You pay 1000USD to get your user connected, really 10 more USD will bankrupt you?)

So the guys are doing the right business, will grow regardless. The guy aren't even survive IP price, will likely not survive many other things--so why we cares.

My suggestions are get over it, leave the v4 alone.

On 17 Apr 2016, at 03:58, Aled Morris <aled.w.morris@googlemail.com> wrote:

On 16 April 2016 at 20:41, Radu-Adrian FEURDEAN <ripe-wgs@radu-adrian.feurdean.net> wrote:

Basically: there is a race. If you are an old competitor, you can
compete as usual. If you are a new one (less that 3 years), you start
with 10L of fuel and you get a 30 sec penalty every time you refill.

The question is, should RIPE be trying to "level the playing field" i.e. interfering in the market? Would it even work if they tried?

The argument has been well made that RIPE's role in dishing out IP addresses should be just that - making sure that there will be addresses to give when new members need them, not playing politics, re-jigging the pool of free addresses to "fix" a business problem that a subset of the members believe they are suffering.

I'm reminded of government intervention to "fix" the problems of broadband availability where rural areas feel they are disadvantaged. The result? hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers money wasted on crap satellite internet connections. Nobody wins.

Aled