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Special report Internet "samurai" and IPv6 advocate Jun Murai announced today he will sell more than 14 million IPv4 addresses and put the proceeds – expected to top US$300m – into a new trust co-owned by Asia-Pacific regional internet registry (RIR) APNIC.
Writing on the website for the organization that Murai founded in 1985 and which owns the addresses, the WIDE Project in Japan, Murai explained: "I have taken a decision to release this address block, for the purpose toward healthy development of today's internet services and toward supporting internet development in the AP [Asia-Pacific] region."
For the curious, the IPv4 addresses in question are vast majority of 43/8, or the addresses 43.*.*.*. Some are already allocated, and Murai owns 87.5 per cent of it, which he is now offloading.
Despite his revered status among internet engineers – Murai is the Japanese equivalent of "father of the internet" Vint Cerf and has been instrumental in internet development in Japan and across the Asia-Pacific region – the decision may prove controversial.
Under rules agreed by all five RIRs, any spare IPv4 addresses are supposed to be returned, for free, to the RIR and be redistributed as needed. But Murai received his address blocks in the early internet days before the rules were put in place, and so is pretty much free to do what he likes with them.
The enormous scarcity in such 32-bit network addresses has given them significant market value: currently each IPv4 address is worth between $20 and $30 apiece, meaning that Murai's seven-eights of a /8 address block, representing 14.7 million addresses, is worth anywhere between $294m and $441m.
It is almost unheard of for such a large block of essentially unused addresses to be sold, and competition is likely to be fierce among giant internet companies, such as Google, Facebook, as well as cable giants and multinational mobile operators who are struggling to deal with demand for IPv4 addresses from customers.
(Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Thursday March 26 2020, @07:11PM (7 children)
I was gonna say, "let him suck eggs, we've got IPv6!"
Yeh, so much for IPv6, "coming soon" for the last ten years.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @07:30PM (5 children)
ipv6 is here, i have it for several years already, sadly some ISP and countries still lag behind for really no reason, many are just waiting for the political decision to enable it
https://6lab.cisco.com/stats/ [cisco.com]
https://ipv6-test.com/stats/ [ipv6-test.com]
Here in Portugal, 1 of the 3 biggest ISP already deployed ipv6 and one big and one smaller one is deploying it by region slowly to not overload their services with support calls if there is some ipv6 problem... but the last big ISP says for several years that it is ready for ipv6 but have yet to really enable it. both a problem of being laziness, don't care and older equipment still deployed
notice that ipv6 may also make some tracking, sniffing and "security" centers in ISP and countries obsolete (they can be upgraded, but that costs money)... so yes, that also justify why some countries are lagging for the ipv6 support
(Score: 2) by zoward on Thursday March 26 2020, @07:36PM (3 children)
As I understand it, almost all of the large ISPs in the U.S. don't support IPv6 yet. I occasionally look in on mine (Charter), but they won't provide it until they feel they have to.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 26 2020, @09:23PM
Odd, I have Charter as well and have had ipv6 support for a while. At least my router reports a global ipv6 address on its wan port and it appears to be functional (ping6 works...) and test-ipv6.com works from one properly configured machine behind the router.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 27 2020, @03:30AM
IPv6 works fine on AT&T. You just can't run only IPv6, because a slowly shrinking number of websites don't support it/don't have infrastructure that supports tunneling.
(Score: 1) by ncc74656 on Friday March 27 2020, @06:23AM
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday March 26 2020, @08:55PM
It's sorta-kinda here. It exists, many devices can support it (but not all). I am using it myself as part of a dual stack. But it's not really HERE until someone setting up a server doesn't even care about IPv4 because they're sure everyone who wants to reach it can do so using v6. That won't be true until all ISPs fully support it.
For that matter, many still have to use HE tunnels to route v6 for their servers.
When v6 is HERE, the value of a v4 address will be nearly nothing and even that will be more novelty value.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Thursday March 26 2020, @08:34PM
Where's he gonna get eggs from?