That's my understanding with ARIN, yeah.
2,256 karma · joined July 24, 2014
How are those two things related?
1. There are a ton of owners sitting on inefficiently used IP space.
Any company (not doing cloud hosting or network transit) that's holding a /8 is almost certainly using it very inefficiently, but an owner like Apple will never feel financial pressure to optimize or sell their /8. However, an owner like the university I went to (with a /16 network currently worth $3 million) will eventually face internal pressure to sell that network when the value rises to say $50 million.
As another example, Yahoo is currently announcing subnets containing 4.3 million IPv4 addresses, which is worth $193.5mm at auction. If the price of IPv4 addresses increased by say 10x, their IPv4 space would probably comprise the bulk of the company's value.
2. Owners will need to adopt IPv6 in order to realize these financial gains.
In order to sell a significant portion of their IPv4 space, an owner will have to compact their IPv4 usage into a much smaller space and migrate everything else to IPv6. This will be a huge undertaking for a lot of these places, but at some point it's worth it. By doing that, IPv6 adoption increases.
There is the potential for a feedback loop to be created where demand for IPv4 drops and the prices decline and so fewer conversions are done, but I tend to believe that IPv4 pricing will remain inelastic.
So basically the invisible hand of the market may guide us to IPv6, but I highly highly doubt we will have seen the last of IPv4 even decades from now.
It seems to me like an arbitrage opportunity, since /24 and /23 networks have many more potential buyers. But you have to be approved with a regional registry for the amount of space in order to buy it.
Observing things from the buy side, I suspect that IP space is being brought to auction in a slow but steady trickle so as to maintain upward momentum on prices. The price has approximately doubled in the last year.
So part of this is putting into service networks that they previously acquired, probably to keep up with growth. Buying in 2018 would have been a MUCH lower price than today -- and it can pretty much only go up!
The ability to launch a public-facing, commercial service and pretend like IPv4 never existed and you don't have to worry about it at all? Probably not within our lifetimes.
At auction the larger networks tend to go for less money per IP since there is a smaller market of people who want and can buy them (you have to be approved by ARIN/RIPE/etc. for the allocation size), which drives the price down.
One in particular: "People don’t even know that we are deporting veterans. I think most Americans assume that when somebody serves, they gain American citizenship. They don’t realize that we are actually deporting people who served honorably."
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/07/us/politics/veterans-depo...
For anything else, there are student loans. Easy to get, hard to get rid of. They have higher interest rates than mortgages, and people take similarly long periods of time to pay them off.
I know people who still owe tens of thousands on their undergraduate loans, decades after graduation. They work, they make payments, but they may never pay them off.
Today's rate for the lower tier 1 private university I attended would be:
Bachelor's: $74,180 per year x 4 = $296,720
Master's: $50,787 per year x 2 = $101,574
Total: $398,274
This is in one of the poorest large cities in the US, so that is WAY out of reach for local residents (without substantial financial aid, which is why I attended).
Tuition goes up every year, so it would actually cost more than this. It's been two decades since I enrolled, and the cost per credit hour has gone from about $900 to $2186 in that time.
For undergraduate that includes room, board, books, fees and tuition. For graduate it's just tuition and fees.
If you want to migrate to another provider, network egress costs mean that you'll spend multiples of your normal monthly operating costs to do so. That stifles competition.
But well before that point, most services in AWS have already been built around avoiding network egress wherever possible. You're always going to prefer AWS APIs and services, even if they aren't the best for your use case, because services outside AWS have a network egress tariff placed on them. So you aren't always buying best-of-breed, you're buying the best of what AWS chooses to offer (or the selection of vendors that choose to build in AWS to remain competitive).
And if that isn't good enough, your only other option is to migrate out (and pay those egress costs!).
If you place a high value on engineering velocity and you already rely on managed services, then I would look to stay in S3. Do the legwork to gather competitive bids (GCS, Azure, maybe one second tier option) and use that in your price negotiation. Negotiation is a skill, so depending on the experience in your team, you may have better or worse results -- but it should be possible to get some traction if you engage in good faith with AWS.
There is a considerable opportunity cost to moving that data to another cloud provider. No matter how well you plan and execute it, you're going to lose some amount of velocity for at least several months. In a worse scenario, you are running two parallel systems for a considerable amount of time and have to pay that overhead cost on your engineering team's productivity. In the worst case scenario, you experience service degradation or even lose customer data. It's quite easy for 2-3 months to turn into 2-3 years when other higher priority requirements appear, and it's also easy for unknowns to pop up and complicate your migration.
With all of that said, if the fully baked cost of migrating to another cloud provider (engineering time + temporary migration services + a period of duplicated costs between services + opportunity cost) is trajectory changing for your business, then it certainly can be done. I feel like GCS is a bit better of a product vs S3, although S3 has managed to iron out some of its legacy cruft in the last few years. Azure is not my cup of tea. I have never seriously considered any other vendors in the space, although there are many.
Your other option is to build it. I've done it several times, people do it every day. You may need someone on the team who either has or can grow the skillset you're going to need: vendor negotiation, capacity planning, hardware qualification, and other operational tasks. You can save a bunch of money, but the opportunity cost can be even greater.
10PB is the equivalent of maybe 1-2 rack of servers in a world where you can easily get 40-50 drive systems with 10-18TB drives (of course for redundancy you would need more like 2-2.5x, and you need space to grow into so that you're always ahead of your user growth curve). At any rate, my point is that the deployment isn't particularly large, so you aren't going to see good economies of scale. If you expect to be in the 100+PB range in 6-12 months, this could still be the right option.
Personally, I would look to build a service like this in S3 and migrate to on-premise at an inflection point probably 2 orders of magnitude above yours, if the future growth curve dictated it. The migration time and cost will be even more onerous, but the flexibility while finding product/market fit probably countermands the cost overhead.
There is a third option, which is hosted storage where someone else runs the machines for you. Personally I see it as a stop-gap solution on the path to running the machines yourself, and so it's not very exciting. But it is a way to minimize your investment before fully committing.
My comment was intended to be more tongue-in-cheek. People fear socialism, but capitalism is not the answer to all of the world's problems.
People have basic needs: safety, sustenance, shelter, self-determination. They have higher level needs too, and we aren't living in a post-scarcity society yet, but we have the resources to meet these basic needs for at least 328 million people.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/08/solyndr...
I find it comical that it's often presented as a giant boondoggle when, as you say, the world is already greener as a result.
Spending our money on a giant military behemoth makes sense in a mutually assured destruction / deterrence sense, but I think that approach only gets you so far. It also creates a gigantic war machine that exists only to find conflicts. The nuclear arsenal strongly deters conflicts from rising above a certain level (as long as rational people are on both sides...), but the rest of the machine gets put to use distressingly often.
You can't just stop funding it tomorrow, and you can't even really reduce its funding without considerable pain and risk, but we must find a way to transition more and more of our military power to economic and cultural diplomacy (which we also have always done, but which has been diminished in recent years).
As another example, I wonder if Wisconsin's sweetheart deal with Foxconn actually had a negative impact on employment. Clearly Foxconn's promised jobs never materialized, but the threat of them coming to town to spend big money may have had a chilling effect on existing or prospective new employers in the area.
Back to the F-35 program, the jobs it creates may be deadweight, deadend careers that don't produce real value. And then you can't just have these people unemployed and starving, so I guess we'll need an F-35+1 program for them and their descendents. And so on forever, until we break this cycle.
Versus something else that you could buy with the same money that has a future and does create real value (like say, solar panels?). But you're right, its just about the perception of jobs and that photo op.
But I guess at least Seagate got a nice building out of it.
I believe one of the big downsides for citizens of Puerto Rico that has caused issues with the push for statehood is that they don't currently pay federal income tax. So it isn't exactly a taxation-without-representation situation, but they are obviously at the mercy of the US in many ways and don't have access to all of the levers of power that are available to others.
Witness the suffering at our delay in suspending the Jones Act (requiring two days of debate) during the Hurricane Maria relief campaign.
I doubt that Puerto Rico's lot would fundamentally change if they were a separate country though, they would still be largely at the mercy of their main trading partner and dominant regional power (the US).
I was also thinking of felons in my earlier comment, but it didn't quite fit my narrative. I don't find the rationale that they would just vote for there to be no laws particularly compelling.
I think that in today's world, if you want science to get funded like defense projects, you'll have to embrace all of the grossness of defense projects. Lobbyists, sub-contractors, patriotic jingoism, fear, etc. Look at how we got to the moon.
I think that putting substantial funding into making the US the world leader in climate change related technology is such an obvious slam dunk that it defies belief for me that there seems to be no political will to do it.
Argue about the reality of climate change if you must, but the simple facts are that there is finite oil, finite coal, finite natural gas and the extraction and processing of those fuels is an expensive and dirty business. Of course solar, wind, hydro and nuclear don't compete yet -- how about putting in the same R&D money as fossil fuels? And when you make it work, the entire world will buy this tech from you. It could clearly be the US's next economic gold rush, after the Internet and post-WW2 manufacturing (and, I guess, the gold rush).
I do wonder if the economic approach is just doomed to be a non-starter, and if the faster way is to frame it as a national security issue. That leads to a number of other problems, but time is clearly of the essence and they know how to spend money over there.
That means DC, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa (collectively 3.8 million US citizens) should all be made states.
There are undoubtedly lots of issues and hiccups with implementing that, but fundamentally I think that having classes of citizens with abridged rights is wrong.
My point is that politically none of that matters. No one is getting elected because people got to book telescope time for their research. The incentives are not correctly aligned to support research and science.
To go back to the F-35 comparison: the NSF has annual funding of $8.3 billion. The F-35 program is projected to cost $21.7 billion per year through its lifespan (2001-2070). I bet it winds up even higher than that, because nothing has yet changed to prevent endless overruns.
So the F-35 makes jobs and maybe a little bit of interesting work gets done as a result of the project despite itself. We as a society could buy so much more than yet another war machine (and maybe not even a useful one) with that money and effort. What could NSF do with another $13 billion every year?
That a fighter plane may or may not come out the other end is only nominally important, the key is to spend the money. The more money spent, the more people get work. That keeps people elected.
Arecibo had 120 FTE employees, mostly in Puerto Rico. Politically speaking that makes it inconsequential.
If you want different outcomes, then the political incentives need to be fundamentally re-aligned.
[1] https://harpers.org/archive/2019/06/the-pentagon-syndrome/
However, I personally believe that his false speech does present an immediate danger to the public on the order of days or weeks.
The classic analogy is that a person shouldn't be allowed to shout "FIRE" and thereby cause panic in a crowded theater, when there is no such fire. The right of the one person to (falsely) speak is outweighed by the right of the many people present to their own safety.
Trump saying "I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!" [1] is clearly equivalent to shouting "FIRE". He has not won the election, he does not have more popular votes or more electoral college votes, and he has presented no proof or substantive argument to contradict this narrative.
That Twitter should put a warning label on statements from powerful people that are objectively false is really the least they can do. To let Trump spread lies without any comment before now has been wholly irresponsible. I wish that Twitter didn't provide a platform for misinformation in the first place.
[1] https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13250998450450718...
As you can see here, he posted about it and there is no warning label:
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/13178254844958801...