Suppose you are wrong. Then, the need for IPv4 is heightened and prolonged, and we will be very sorry we didn't create a smooth and above-board mechanism for transfers.
If you believe that then you should be lobbying government because the RIRs do not have the power to create a smooth and above-board mechanism for transfers. The RIRs are not much more than registries which manage and publish a database. The database and the RIR processes are already above-board.
Umm, why not? And how do you _know_ that it is a "few"?
Because the RIRs don't have the mandate or the resources to cater to a few companies who have gotten themselves into a fix. I know that it will only be a "few" because the IPv4 supply is shrinking dramatically down to zero. Soon there will be very few IPv4 blocks available to be transfered therefore the companies (sellers and buyers) who would benefit from a transfer policy are very few. Also, how do we know that sellers and buyers would actually benefit, in a real sense, from a transfer policy? All the buyers will be companies in a desperate situation, and as soon as the transfer becomes known in the RIPE database, their customers could begin to flee.
I'm afraid this is a completely bogus prediction about the action of courts, made by a non-lawyer, with no specification of which legal system/courts he is talking about, nor the legal grounds upon which such a decision would be based, or what kind of litigation would put the issue into the courts to begin with.
This applies equally to your comments and to those of almost everybody who is involved in RIRs and transfer policy discussions. This is a good reason for us to reject these transfer policies so that RIPE can focus on its competencies, not try to take on the legislative and economic functions of government departments.
The auctioning of mobile spectrum in the U.S. has not forced broadcasters, who got their spectrum for free, to account for their spectrum holdings according to a projected market value.
Thanks for making my point clear. Governments, and their regulatory agencies, have the power to do things which RIPE cannot do.
This is just weird. If v4 addresses are sold in a competitive market, you call them "unpredictable." But you call the price of v6 service "predictable" because....it is sold in a competitive market.
A small market with few buyers and sellers, is very unpredictable. You need a certain amount of trading volume for the law of large numbers to kick in and begin to get some level of predicability. IPv6 network service is a variation of IPv4 network service, so there is a market with enough volume of sales to give some level of predictability. If an IPv4 address shortage causes pain to ISPs then they will price their IPv6 service a bit lower than the comparable IPv4 service in order to encourage uptake.
Sure, they'll sell access to 1/10th of the internet for less than the price of 100% access. What you may not be taking into account is the universal connectivity associated with v4.
I'm afraid you don't understand the technology that underlies all of this. There is no good reason why IPv6 network access could not provide reachability to 100% of the Internet. The IPv6 transition has been going on for 10 years or so and most of the technical issues have been worked out. Things like 6to4 and Teredo are well understood and widely used today. NAT-PT is also in use, and the IETF is working on resolving the last design issues with their work on NAT64. I am assuming that ISPs will sort out the remaining technical issues and deploy them within the next two to three years so that they can indeed provide IPv6 network access that allows communication with 100% of the Internet. --Michael Dillon