51–60 of 79 posts
So in the end, they take a public good that is basically free, a lot lot lot of it, and like a hold up they make a lot of money racketeering you monthly because you are too insignificant to be allowed to own your own ips...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume the high bits would be in the variable length ip option field. So to an old stack it would look like a packet from 13.14.15.16 to 5.6.7.8. Both of those devices would have to be capable of routing ipv6 packets, but nothing in between would.
Hmm, might work for the middle boxes that just do routing. This would then only really work with both ends supporting this new IPv6 though. If one side only spoke OG IPv4 and the other side spoke this weird IPv6 with half its address bits in the header, there's a good chance the IPv4 side would just ignore the header bits on its return packets and thus wouldn't address it right. So, while that router in the middle mi…
Yeah, that would be the transition period. Where any v6 router would also be a NAT gateway for any OG connections and would have to have both a v4 and v6 address.
> So the approximate value of Amazon's IPv4 estate today is about: $4.6 Billion dollars! > AWS will likely make anywhere between $400 Million and $1 Billion dollars a year with this new IPv4 charge! In other words, it's not clear AWS is "making" anything at all. It might take them over 10 years to pay back the cost of what it would take to acquire them today. Now I assume Amazon is making some level of profit on them…
They already own those IPs and there is no ongoing fee to keep owning them. So everything they make is profit since they costs have already been accounted for. Like if you already owned a piece of land and let people rent houses on the land, and now you're charging them extra rent per square foot of land. You already own the land, so it's pure profit, because before you were including the cost of land in the houses.…
IP addresses are intangible property and, at this scale, their cost would probably be amortized over a period of e.g. 20 years.
For accounting (and tax purposes), it's not one big up-front cost where everything that follows is pure profit.
Just because costs happen before income, it doesn't follow that all the income is profit. You have to look at things over the expected useful time frame of property.
> So the approximate value of Amazon's IPv4 estate today is about: $4.6 Billion dollars! > AWS will likely make anywhere between $400 Million and $1 Billion dollars a year with this new IPv4 charge! In other words, it's not clear AWS is "making" anything at all. It might take them over 10 years to pay back the cost of what it would take to acquire them today. Now I assume Amazon is making some level of profit on them…
The IPv4 space almost certainly did not cost them $4.6 billion to acquire. They acquired it much cheaper, and they can’t reasonably sell it because they need it for users. So charging for it when they previously did not nets them revenue they were leaving on the floor before.
You are of course correct that this gives them revenue, my point is that the article is falsely framing this entirely as profit.
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The IPv4 space almost certainly did not cost them $4.6 billion to acquire. They acquired it much cheaper, and they can’t reasonably sell it because they need it for users. So charging for it when they previously did not nets them revenue they were leaving on the floor before.
The exact price doesn't matter. The point is, it's wrong to conflate profits with income. You need to subtract costs before you can declare that Amazon "makes" a particular amount of money. You are of course correct that this gives them revenue , my point is that the article is falsely framing this entirely as profit .
Jeez. Eventually someone is going to break down and invent a new IP solution that doubles the number of addresses that we have now. I mean if I were doing it, I'd probably make it more like 1,028 times bigger but maybe it would present as hubris. Addresses would be so plentiful they'd basically be free. And since I am using magic to do all of this, I'd invent it over 20 years ago, so that it'd have been decades since…
I know you're joking & making fun of glacial IPv6 adoption, but if IPv6 was just IPv4 + more address bits, I'm sure it'd be fully adopted by now and IPv4 would be something kids taking computer networking courses would be taught about in the "history" section. IPv6 involved too many other changes to make it a straightforward upgrade. I agree that it's ridiculous that we still don't have universal v6 support, but let'…
I wish IPng had taken a totally different approach to addressing and routing:
- for addressing, yes, very large (or even variable-length, like CNLP, see below) addresses fields in the IPng header
- for routing, the IPng header should have had a source and destination ASN fields, with the source being filled in by the sender's router(s) (either immediately in the interior, or at the edge), and the destination ASN fields to be filled in by the sender by querying something like the DNS (but optimized for, essentially, CIDR-style IP->ASN lookups, though DNS can do it). This would have made routing much simpler and faster, since routing protocols would only have to exchange information about ASNs and not about any address prefixes, thus yielding much smaller routing tables. The address->ASN lookup service would have needed very little churn since its contents would change only when sites change Internet service providers.
I wasn't there then, so don't blame me, but also honestly I probably wouldn't have thought of this either.
In practice we ended up with something just like this but... without address number portability, which is a shame.
What is raging is to know that IP v4 address ranges are provided at no cost to organisations. And even if they still had to acquire some from other organizations at a cost, there certainly don't have to pay a regular fee to keep them. So in the end, they take a public good that is basically free, a lot lot lot of it, and like a hold up they make a lot of money racketeering you monthly because you are too insignifican…
* Aside from a very minimal amount of space allocated for v6 transition technologies[1] and from the waitlist[2], organizations do have to pay market rates for IP addresses.
* Organizations do need to pay a yearly fee to keep them, which scales with the amount of address space held.[3]
* You are not too insignificant to be allowed to own your own IPs - anyone can establish at least 2 peering relationships, ask ARIN for an ASN, and acquire some IPs.
[1]: https://www.arin.net/participate/policy/nrpm/#6-5-3-1-subseq...
[2]: https://www.arin.net/participate/policy/nrpm/#4-1-8-arin-wai...
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IPv5 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx for the win! /s
Tbh not sure why the protocol couldn't be upgraded so that xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, xxxx.xxxx.xxxx.xxxx and xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx are all accepted. Seems a monumentally shite oversight to not be like that. I mean it's a freaking telephone book address system. Astounding they baked it in just xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx and didn't upgrade the protocol at all in the last 20 years (is this just entirely due to profit/asset protecting?). Resp…
- "Updating the standard" is making a new protocol
- "forced suppliers to patch updates" - how?
- "USB backwards compatability that shiz. The fact I can take a modern usb device and plug it in a 1.1 gen port and it still just works. Why the hell isn't ipv4 like that for upgrades?" - because you're changing the address space of the protocol. If the new standard can address more than 2^32 things, then it won't be backwards compatible with v4.
- "Seriously is there any real technical hurdle why we didn't do it this way?" - Assuming you're talking about having a variable-length address from the start in IPV4, because I assume having a non-fixed packet header size would be much more computationally expensive and violate a lot of assumptions that you can make when the header is fixed (having a fixed region of the buffer that is known to always be the full header). You'd be much better having a fixed-length address that is enough to cover all possible nodes in the network - exactly what IPV6 has done.
- "Astounding they baked it in just xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" - IPV4 was first deployed in 1982. Wikipedia tells me that the year before, there were just over 200 nodes on the ARPANET. I think you're doing a bit of a disservice to the people who designed this stuff by castigating them for not factoring a 20'000'000x increase in network size into their protocol.
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AWS is holding onto those routers running something earlier than, what, IOS 12.4 from 2005? And all those servers with iDRAC6s from, what, 2012? Some day people will stop pretending IPv6 support is something that hasn't been ubiquitous in network gear for a decade or more.
The gear might support it in theory, but may not actually have sufficiently powerful CPUs or enough RAM to actually handle all the traffic. Also there is a bunch of software in between that needs upgrades. If it were easy and straightforward they would have done it years ago. The fact that even today most things AWS don’t support ipv6 tells me that it’s hard.
You have absolutely no idea what their constraints are or what their IPv6 decision making process is. Neither do I. It might be operational issues. It might be legacy code. It might just be because they've figured not doing it makes them more money or because they think not enough customers are asking for it. Hell, it could be as simple as the right executive thinking "IPv6 is a fad" and roadblocking. But it's not "because the hardware doesn't support it"; that's a long ago solved problem. And AWS designs/builds their own networking gear, so they aren't waiting on Cisco or whomever to give them what they need...they would have done it years ago.