http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=199700668
Sometime in the next six years, the Internet will run out of
space. Expediting the migration to IPv6 is the solution to
the impending crisis, says ARIN.
By Thomas Claburn
InformationWeek
May 21, 2007 09:45 PM
The coming shortage of Internet Protocol addresses prompted
the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) on Monday
to call for a faster migration to the new Internet Protocol,
IPv6.
The current version, IPv4, allows for more than 4 billion
(2^32) Internet addresses. Only 19% of the IPv4 address
space remains. Somewhere around 2012-13, 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's
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 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 underappreciated -- 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."
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