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Comment by Ericson2314 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I would like the FTC go after new IPv4 deployments / mandate dual stack on anti-trust grounds.

That's an interesting idea. I don't know if the FTC has the authority to do so under the current powers given to it by Congress, and I don't know if I'd like the precedent of them trying without Congress so delegating that power. I'd be totally willing to discuss Congress delegating them said authority.

How does IPv4's use translate to anti-trust?

Controlling 200 times more of a critical resource than the next competitor does not sound like healthy competition.

That's if you can define IPV4 as a critical resource. But because anyone can assign any IPv4 address to anything and advertise it with BGP, it can't fit the definition of that.

There would be penalties for that, maybe even legal ones. How easy it is to steal does not really factor in whether it's a critical resource.

Can it be defined as property? I could make a Internet The Second using isolated networks and advertise whatever I wanted. It's not like digital movies and music where it's defined as property under copyright law because it's a creative work.

Isolated? Sure.

This is the same as saying no one can own a Disney character because anyone can draw it at home. Or no one owns songs because you can freely transmit them between devices you own.

People still own those things in most jurisdictions around the world.

The thing with Disney is that those characters were created by someone in a creative pursuit. IP addresses, on the other hand, are simply pointers to some location, and so it's an unknown if they can be covered under IP law. Digital copies of media only count as property because of that IP law, or they would be worthless because they can be copied infinitely.

That you call global IPv4 addresses to be a critical resource is extremely odd. If I go to prudential.com or to another insurer's website, the IP delivery addressing protocol doesn't affect competition.

A user doesn't really see any difference when traffic gets delivered over IPv6 instead of IPv4, so the scarcity of the global IPv4 space is meaningless compared to the incredibly vast usable size of the global IP space.

According to Google's statistics https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html over 65% cannot reach them via IPv6.

So offering any service just on IPv6 makes no sense in 99% of the cases. You can use if for some internal cases, if you can be sure that all your users have IPv6 wherever they happen to be.

If you are cloud provider and cannot offer your customers as many public IPv4 addresses as they want you are out of business.

Still, use of IPv4 does not constitute anti-trust.

Using it doesn't. But having a pool of 200 times more than the next competitor does. I'm not sure whether according to the letter of the law. Courts would decide that a decade later if any administration went to court. But certainly in the spirit of free competition.

Promoting the continued dominance of a standard which causes artificial scarcity.

I can't understand the reasoning here.

They need to go after other service provider, not isp. ISP provide CGNAT to facilitate access to ipv4 only service.

Yeah I don't have much any problem with doing CGNat. We need to get the ISPs to do IPv6, and we need to penalize AWS when a customer chooses to do IPv4 only. (They will pass on the fee, which is just fine easier than going after the customers directly.)

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