“No, the sky is most certainly NOT falling,” is my typical response to any question regarding the exhaustion of our IP version 4 (IPv4) public address pool. With ARIN (the Regional Internet Registry responsible for managing IP address allocations in North America) likely to issue its remaining IPv4 address space in the next few days, we can only expect this event will come with plenty of fan fair and news reporters pandering FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) to the masses in order to drive up hysteria prior to the sky falling. In fact, ARIN has already failed to fulfill at least one request for address space due to insufficient available space… but as another reminder, the sky is still not falling.
Scenario 1 is very unlikely so we won’t discuss that in detail, but scenario 2 presents a very intriguing situation as it has already started happening in some cases. Four years ago Microsoft reportedly paid $7.5m to Nortel for 666,624 IPv4 addresses (roughly $11.25/address) as a part Nortel’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy asset liquidation. With four years of time and exhaustion of the ARIN IPv4 address pool passing, it can only be assumed this valuation has increased and it will be very interesting to see how the open market for IPv4 address space evolves. Some very unlikely organizations such as public university with very large IPv4 address space legacy allocations (e.g. prior to ARIN requiring justification) might suddenly find they are sitting on a very valuable asset. Their IPv4 address space assets could now be easily valued into the multiple millions of dollars. This option also presents the very interesting possible formation of an IPv4 address space commodities market. A quick online search shows a small amount of chatter about this topic and warrants ongoing observation.
Scenario 3 seems like a move to be made out of desperation or desire for revenue generation, risking network stability in lieu of reclaiming IPv4 address space. It is highly probable organizations will re-address their networks for the purposes of freeing up IPv4 address space to be sold on the open market as a source of revenue. Many ISPs “re-organizing” their IPv4 address space for the purposes of selling it creates a very real concern that they will implement kludgy solutions such as Carrier-grade Network Address Translations (CGN). If these start running rampant across the Internet (which has already occurred at some ISPs) it can cause a lot of very real issues with how the Internet functions.
The final result of the coming scarcity of public IPv4 addresses is yet to be seen and I don’t think it will be a “doomsday” event by any means. We will likely see a combination of the 3 scenarios come to fruition and I think that scenarios 2 and 3 will be the most prevalent. However, there will be concerns with how things are regulated with new marketplaces and how existing regulations will apply or need to change to adapt.