Posted on 05/22/2007 12:03:34 PM PDT by ShadowAce
The coming shortage of Internet Protocol addresses on Monday prompted the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) to call for a faster migration to the new Internet Protocol, IPv6.
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The current version of the Internet Protocol, IPv4, allows for over 4 billion (2^32) Internet addresses. Only 19% of the IPv4 address space remains. Somewhere around 2012-2013, the last Internet address bloc will be assigned and the Internet will be full, in a manner of speaking.
"We must prepare for IPv4's depletion, and ARIN's resolution to encourage that migration to IPv6 may be the impetus for more organizations to start the planning process," said John Curran, chairman of ARIN's Board of Trustees, in a statement.
IPv6 promises some 16 billion-billion possible addresses (2^128).
IP numbers are used to route traffic around the Internet. They're not the same thing as Internet domain names, which get mapped to IP numbers through the Domain Name System (DNS) because it's much easier to remember "Amazon.com" than "72.21.203.1."
"Unless action is taken now, a quiet technical crisis will occur, not unlike Y2K in its complications, but without a fixed date or high level public attention," wrote Stephen M. Ryan, a partner at McDermott Will & Emery LLP and ARIN general counsel, and Raymond A. Plzak, CEO and president of ARIN, in a forthcoming policy paper.
Ryan and Plzak foresee potential legal problems arising as address scarcity leads to a new black market in IP numbers.
IP numbers are not, like Internet domain names, seen as property by U.S. courts as a consequence of Gary Kremen's litigation to recover the Sex.com domain. In the course of that dispute, Kremen in 2001 was awarded the assets of an ISP that defendant Stephen Cohen (news, bio, voting record) had acquired, which included IP numbers.
Kremen then engaged in litigation with ARIN to obtain his IP numbers without signing the ARIN registration service agreement. In essence, he claimed ownership rights in the IP numbers rather than the more limited set of rights governed by ARIN's contract. The U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif. rejected Kremen's claim last year, upholding ARIN's regulatory power over IP numbers.
But a number of companies, organizations, and individuals hold IP numbers that predate ARIN's arrival on the scene in 1997. Holders of IP address blocs awarded during the Internet's early days may be sitting on a gold mine. Because they're not bound by an ARIN contract, they're theoretically free to sell their IP numbers. They haven't done so because, among other things, there's no money in it at the moment. But if the IPv6 migration continues to lag and IP addresses become scarce, holders of legacy IP address blocs could find it profitable to sell their numbers.
"The characteristics of such a market are yet to form," said Ryan and Plzak in their paper, Legal and Policy Aspects of Internet Number Resources. "It could, for example, result in delivering 'windfall' profits to those who early on obtained legacy address blocs. Corporate assets will instantly be more valuable if they have such blocs as 'assets.'"
Karl Auerbach, former member of the board of directors of ICANN, former Cisco researcher, CTO of InterWorking Labs, and an attorney, happens to be someone who obtained a legacy IP bloc back when Professor Jon Postel ran the Internet.
"I've had people who want to acquire my spaces, some for some pretty hefty amounts," Auerbach said in an e-mail, noting than the legal status of IP numbers remains muddy. "Those deals fell through due to uncertainty about whether routing ISPs would honor the deal and accept routing announcements. Without the cooperation of the ISPs, an attempt to transfer space can be futile."
Auerbach said he has loaned IP address numbers to friends on a short-term basis. "But that kind of thing is from the spirit of the Internet of the '70s and '80s but certainly not the commercialized Net of today," he explained. "But don't 'cha think that in many ways the old ways are a nice residual from a more halcyon and more cooperative era?"
As for making a legitimate market for IP address space, Auerbach supports the idea. He also agrees that IPv6 transition won't be easy.
One controversial method for dealing with the IP address shortage has been the increasing use of Network Address Translation (NAT), which effectively creates a private network within a given IP address.
"The issue of NATs has been under appreciated -- they are awful things that cause great trouble," Auerbach said. "But we've learned to live with 'em and new protocols are even being designed in anticipation of NATs. So perhaps the Net of the future might evolve as an IPv4 public mesh connecting private spaces behind NATs. For that we have enough IPv4 space for decades. That scenario runs into trouble when those private spaces try to directly interconnect. But, like Scarlett O'Hara, most of us will think about that tomorrow."
Sounds like a couple of lawyers looking for a case to litigate.
There is no shortage of IP address space. Period. With NAT and CIDR, there is no shortage.
WTF.. when has NAT been "controversial"?!...
We’re Doomed!
Someone call the inventor (Algore)!!!
I have been hearing this for literally a decade! NAT took most of the sting out of it now a company with hundreds of employees have them all on the net via one IP addy..
If we use only three letter suffixes like .com, there are 26^3 or 17,576 combimations available in suffexes alone.
Add the ten numeric digits and make them four places and there are 36^4 or 1,679,616 combinations available.
Make them seven digits (like typical big state license plates) and the possible combinations jump to 36^7 or 78 billion, 364 million plus or enough to give 12 different 7 digists suffixes to each of the 6.7 billion people on earth . . . before even calculating what proceeds the .com1234 or whatever.
Not the lawyers, the government. There are privacy concerns with IPv6, and it will make it easier for the powers that be to track you. China is, of course, hell-bent on implementing IPv6 ASAP.
Large ad corporations like this, too, as depending on the setup it will be very easy to track individual visitors to sites. I place my bet on most IPv6 implementations defaulting to this setup.
I’ll get right on this as soon as I get that 2K calendar disaster fixed.
You're talking about URLs--not IP addresses. A URL is mapped to an IP address in the form of www.xxx.yyy.zzz strictly for human readability.
I hope they don’t ruin the internet with legislation like they did radio and television.
Good grief...... something else to worry about.
You’re confusing Domain Names with IP addresses.
There are a fixed number of IPv4 addresses and nothing will change that. What is typically done to mitigate it is the use of private addresses (10., 172.16, and 192.168.). This is how your linksys or netgear switches work they give you (by default) a 192.168.1 network but to the outside world youre only one IP address.
IP reclamation could easily solve this problem. Too many IPs were given away (how many class A’s does apple have?) when we thought we would never run out..
I’ve got a box full of IP addresses stored in my closet, right under the Beaney Babies.
There a guy down the street that’s selling them cheap, and he told me some day they’ll be worth a bunch of money.
Send me an email and I’ll give you his number.
“I hope they don’t ruin the internet with legislation like they did radio and television.”
They are politicians.
You can’t stop them from doing what they do best.
In the minds of some academic purists.
Listen, I wasn’t at the center of the IPv4 vs. v6 wars in the IETF. I got to sit on the sidelines and chat about this stuff with my buddies and co-engineers at cisco when this crap was really going hot and heavy. The academics really hate NAT. It isn’t “clean” and so on.
We at cisco didn’t care about “clean” — we just knew that there was too much installed base to ask for a mass conversion to IPv6.
There might be a gradual conversion to IPv6, but IPv4 will be tunneled inside v6 for a long time to migrate addressing. The v6 backbone was tunneled inside v4 for the starting point.
Third world countries with no installed base had the luxury of starting with v6, but the US never had that luxury; after all, the Internet started here and has been here longer than anywhere else.
Oh - as for the gummit being able to monitor the ‘net better if they go to v6: yea, until people put together a network of v4 tunnel proxies and such. Once you start tunneling and proxies, you can completely evade gooberment snoopers. That’s how they’re getting around ‘net censorship in other countries. Not rocket science.
NATs are controversial when an ISP puts all their customers behind one. It isn’t very common in the US, but is becoming more common in smaller nations with limited numbers of available IPs.
If your ISP puts you behind a NAT, you end up with a non-routable IP and you cannot use many Internet services. Generally, you can’t use P2P services, VPNs or most online games.
“Sounds like a couple of lawyers looking for a case to litigate.
There is no shortage of IP address space. Period. With NAT and CIDR, there is no shortage.”
Bingo. Add PAT to the list around the IPv4 address space equation as well.
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