[LINK] IPv4 auction site

stephen at melbpc.org.au stephen at melbpc.org.au
Thu Apr 21 00:35:54 AEST 2011


Anyone can now bid for a block of IPv4 addresses 

 http://tradeipv4.com

1. What is this site about?

Free IPv4 addresses are about to run out. 

The regional registries (RIRs) have few blocks of addresses left; the 
Asia-Pacific registry (APNIC) already has stopped regular allocations and 
reserves the remaining addresses for small allocations to new companies. 

Some reserves are left from the early days of the internet when address 
allocations were made more generously than today. Users of these 
addresses may not actually need them anymore, but had little motivation 
to return them to the RIRs. 

This site offers a free market for IPv4 addresses, allowing resource 
holders that don't need them anymore to sell or lease them to operators 
who are short of addresses.

2. How does it work?

This marketplace is organized similar to a stock exchange: resource 
holders can place offers to sell or lease address space, and service 
providers can bid for this address space. 

The trading price is determined for each of the service regions, 
separately for sales and leases. In addition, addresses that are offered 
for sale across regions are traded at a separate price.

3. Is it legal?

The RIRs have anticipated this situation for a long time, and have 
changed their policies to allow explicit transfer of addresses between 
local registries (LIRs) within their respective service region (Africa - 
draft policy, North America, Asia Pacific, Latin America and the 
Carribean, and Europe). 

Policies vary somewhat across region. Transfer across regions is 
currently not supported by the policies, but changing policies in this 
respect is under discussion. Certain aspects are unregulated; for 
example, whether or not legacy (pre-RIR) allocations can be transferred 
across regions is a gray zone.

4. What about IPv6?

The IETF has worked on introducing IPv6 precisely to prevent the 
situation that is occurring now: if all had went well, we would be using 
IPv6 in the internet, and there was no address shortage. 

Many reasons have been discussed for this lack of acceptance; many 
believe that the absence of economic forces has caused users to ignore 
IPv6. With the actual exhaustion of the IPv4 space, this may change. 

We believe that the development of the market price for IPv4 addresses 
will determine whether users move to IPv6 or not.

--

Cheers,
Stephen



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