On 9 okt 2008, at 12:44, <michael.dillon@bt.com> <michael.dillon@bt.com> wrote: With apologies for the late respond due to a holiday
You are deliberately forestalling the possibility of new entrants getting any IPv4 after exhaustion, never mind existing operators for whom IPv4 pays employees' salaries. Is this the right tradeoff for the industry?
New entrants typically want to see predictable prices or else they simply don't enter. Currently, the price for IPv4 addresses is predictable. After a transfer scheme is in place, and speculators take up the remaining free pool, the price of IPv4 will be wildly unpredictable. That situation will block new entrants.
An unpredictable price might me make people scratch their head a bit more or think over the business case again, I don't think it will stop them from entering. The price of oil (and other related products like natural gas) is also largely unpredictable, the only thing you can really say is that, as we slowly run out the price will go up. Yet in the end people are buying new stuff and investing in new plants which largely depend on these resources, while there are alternatives (sun/ wind/water) available which have a much more predictable pricing scheme, moslty the (higher) build cost. Consider the choise between IPv4/IPv6 largely the same, go for the easy way and hanle the increasing cost or go with 'renewable' resources like IPv6. As stated before, I don't like the idea of a market, but I would rather see some policy in place before it goes underground. Should, like you stated in earlier discussions, no market arise because there are no (large) sellers, we might have wasted some time. But better safe then sorry. Groet, MarcoH