On Sat Nov 20, 2021 at 06:26:45PM +0100, Benny Lyne Amorsen wrote: > Current pricing of IPv4 is above $40USD per address, so freeing another > /8 has a value of hundreds of millions of USD.
Who to, are the LIRs going to charge for this space or are people expecting it to be free like other private space? If LIR do charge where does that money go, will RIPE pay me to remain a member, pay a lump of cash or use it for community benefit? v4 was not scary at $10 a few years ago, $40 is getting more scary and as supply dries up so it gets over $100 that's probably the ISPs margin for the first year or more of service. I'd say that is scary if customers won't pay for it as an extra, and there's always ISPs who land grabbed enough space to last them 1000 years who will include it for free to undercut those who can't so charging may be hard. Then there is that notional value of the space. Governments like taxing and a rise in value is a common target. Those ISPs with enough to give away may get away without paying a tax on it (we din't buy it, we don't sell it). If you've bought space and charged customers for it you'd have a hard time arguing that your holdings do not have value so you'd end up paying tax further decreasing your margin compared to that competitor. Just speculation but we have to be careful what we wish for. > It is great to take the approach of "just use IPv6", when I bet that > every one of us on this list have at least one IPv4 address per > connection That's a sad artifact of the way it was implemented. That doesn't mean we should not get on and negate that requirement. > A onetime cost of $40 is not scary for us, and address > scarcity is good for the value of the IP space owned by the ISPs and > other organizations that are our employers. The value is transitory, assuming v6 will replace it then as we get closer to that the v4 price will plummet, it's only worth something if you have some you don't need at a good time to sell. So value is not good for anyone who isn't in a position to sell or needs to buy. It is a bubble. brandon
