* Nick Hilliard
On 25/07/2013 15:44, Tore Anderson wrote:
- What kind of problems are you foreseeing?
address hoarding,
I would actually claim that this is not difficult to pull off under today's policy either. If you want to set up a LIR to hoard address space, you can team up with someone who does have "need". (There are several buyers on the Listing Service who are seeking large blocks, perhaps a good place to start looking.) Make a proposition to them to loan them any address space you are able to find and buy on the market for free. With their ripe-583 forms in hand, your "hoarder LIR" has the required need to get approval from the NCC to receive allocation transfers. When the time comes that you need the addresses yourself, terminate the loaning contracts and reassign/transfer to yourself as appropriate.
leading to reduction in market liquidity,
The numbers I posted in my previous message suggest that the market is only supplying 3-4% of actual demand (assuming last year's demand is a good indicator of this year's). I'd say that this is not a particularly liquid market to begin with, making it hard to see how any kind of further marginalisation of whatever little liquidity is there now can be a significant issue to the community when looking at the bigger picture.
leading to profiteering.
It's perfectly possible and sanctioned by today's policy for LIRs to make a profit from IPv4. I gave an example to Filiz earlier about how you can, under today's policy, set up an LIR that only exists to lease out IPv4 blocks to whatever End Users are willing to pay the most. We were talking about the /22 allocation from the "last /8" then, but the procedure would work equally well for transfers - simply line up End Users and gather their ripe-582 forms, find space on the market and buy it, assign whatever you bought to whoever is first in line (or willing to pay the most). Lather, rinse, repeat. When a certain allocation has been in your possession for 24 months, you may also choose to transfer it away, or just keep leasing it out of course. Do whatever maximises your profits. You're not in any way breaching current policy, after all, you're essentially just operating an LIR. I'm not saying this is "good" or this is "bad", all I'm saying this can be done today, it's not something new that 2013-03 brings to the table.
- What kind of control mechanisms exist in today's policy, that are removed by 2013-03, will forestall these problems?
historically, two things: the presence of policies which make it difficult to transfer large amount of address space from many different sources,
Could you point out which part/passage of the policy you're referring to here? I am under the impression that if you have approval from the NCC for, say, a /8, there's no language in the current policy that makes it more difficult to transfer 16384 /22s from 16384 different sources, compared to transferring 1 /8 from 1 source. [I have absolutely no problems seeing that performing lots of small purchases is wildly more difficult than performing one large one, but for reasons that has nothing to do with any current policy language. Locating all the sellers and striking a deal with all of them, for starters.]
secondly, the fact that IP addresses had little market value due to the fact they were effectively being dispensed for $notmuch by the rirs. I.e. lots of effort for little return.
But - this already changed when the RIPE NCC ran out of space and implemented the last /8 policy last September. I don't see what change is brought by 2013-03 in this regard? Could you point to the changed/removed policy language in question?
s/24-month reallocation freeze/requirement to demonstrate need/
Does this argument work equally well?
it's the same argument, which means that we need to understand that it is a bad idea to put any faith in the 24-month reallocation freeze rule as a means of regulating the market, or to believe that the rule will stay there as a long term fixture.
So just to make sure I have not misunderstood you here, you are also accepting the following argument to be equally valid (or invalid) as the one you wrote above? "we need to understand that it is a bad idea to put any faith in the requirement to demonstrate need rule as a means of regulating the market, or to believe that the rule will stay there as a long term fixture." Tore