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Comment by zauguin | Hacker News Reader

> [...] if you want to get a /24 block from RIPE NCC when you sign up as a member, then you are currently looking at a 2 month wait for a recycled IPv4 /24 block.

That's a rather optimistic view of the situation. The next member who will get a block has already been waiting for 2 months and it's unclear when they will get one. It stands to reason that members applying now wold have to wait (potentially significantly) more than 2 months.

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I applied in October last year, and at that time the waiting list was zero days, so I received our /24 instantaneously.

Some nice data on the prices of IPv4 addresses: https://auctions.ipv4.global/prior-sales

Should change to a montly fee. Then people would get rid of the ones not used.

> Should change to a montly fee. Then people would get rid of the ones not used.

There is a fee. Your EUR 1,400 annual fee.

For that money you get one IPv4 and one IPv6 (IPv4 subject to availability, obvs!).

Above that they charge per resource assignment, 50EUR per annum per resource assignment ( defined as: "IPv4 and IPv6 PI assignments; Anycast assignments; IPv4 and IPv6 IXP assignments; and Legacy IPv4 resource registrations through a sponsoring LIR. AS Numbers are excluded from this charge")

And yes, I think the 50EUR should be put on a ladder scale so hoarders get charged exponentially more. ;-)

> And yes, I think the 50EUR should be put on a ladder scale so hoarders get charged exponentially more. ;-)

They would just start to put IPV4 blocks behind shell companies.

Which is essentially what is already happening. There was a minor uproar, that seems to have died out, on the RIPE address policy working group listserv over companies and individuals signing up for multiple RIPE accounts (called LIRs) to be able to get multiple /24 allocations from the waiting list. People register multiple LIRs primarily because the cost of signing up for a RIPE account--prior to 2022, it was a 2,000EUR sign-up fee and then a prorated portion of 1,400EUR annual fee, now it is a 1,000EUR sign-up fee and 1,400EUR annual--and waiting out the two years for IPv4 addresses to be eligible for transfer is a fraction of the price a /24 can fetch on the address resale market.

Several people on the list, including someone who has made quite the sum from collecting allocations and then reselling them, were outraged that this is going on and deem it in violation of the spirit of the waiting list (that spirit being that it is supposed to give small entrants one last method of getting onto the Internet with their own /24). One of the proposed changes is to make transfers of IPv4 space received via the waiting list non-transferable retroactive to January 2021. Of course, transfers that have already happened wouldn't be reversed, since that wouldn't "be fair." Thus, all of the people who got the last "free" /22 blocks around November 2019 and who have gone on to resell those addresses (like the participant on the list who is now advocating that addresses shouldn't be allowed to be transferred) when the 24-month transfer delay expired get to keep their gains. Everyone who comes after who signed up under those rules gets the rules changed out from underneath them.

The whole system of dealing with IPv4 assignments and allocations has gotten completely out of hand. We have these large entities all acting like they are just volunteers doing a charitable thing keeping this polite ad-hoc system going, when that hasn't been true for at least a decade.

“Can’t be transferred” is hard to enforce on something that can be owned by a company, which itself can be sold.

Which was one of the several points raised on the discussion at the time along with the idea that it would only embolden the address speculators trying to use the waitlist. The theory was that the speculators would go to the trouble of making shell companies or "gaming" a transfer as part of a merger-and-acquisition, while so-called legitimate users would either not bother or would just go to the secondary market from the beginning.

Georgism rears its head once more

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