AWS over the last decade has spent $ billions buying up ASN blocks.
I've never been one to use the word "rent seeking", but owning IPs is the ultimate rent seeking cloud business. Domain names can change registries but if you own the underlining IP being used (and there's a depleting supply of them) - it's a great business to charge rents on.
Looking at it a different way, IPv4 addresses are scarce so it makes more economic sense to have fewer, central owners that can maximize usage, rather than millions of individuals owners, many or most of which would not necessarily be using them at any given time.
Putting a price on IP address usage again is a mechanism to prevent squatting/hoarding a scarce resource.
But if you don’t want to “rent” IP addresses from anyone, you can still find blocks for sale. Last time I checked (last year) class C blocks were going for $15k-$20k.
> makes more economic sense to have fewer, central owners that can maximize usage
What you have described is effectively a China-style ICP license[1]. Unless you are willing to give a big name cloud provider $x per month, you shouldn't be able to put a service on the internet?
"We" are not doing anything of the sort. 11 years into IPv6 and you still can't single home a network behind v6. Much like DNSSEC the purists refuse to admit that it has basically been a failure outside of very specific use cases.
You can't buy/sell/trade "ASN blocks". The only people handling "ASN blocks" are the 5 RIRs (APNIC, RIPE NCC, ARIN, AfriNIC and LACNIC) and IANA.
> owning IPs is the ultimate rent seeking cloud business
It also seems that your use of "rent seeking" doesn't match established use. It normally refers to people extracting money for things far beyond their actual value. The IPv4 market is working pretty well on a supply vs. demand price feedback loop, i.e. the prices are in fact just reflecting the scarcity of IPv4 addresses. The term "rent seeking" does not fit that situation.
> It also seems that your use of "rent seeking" doesn't match established use.
No, OP used it exactly correctly. It's the textbook definition.
> It normally refers to people extracting money for things far beyond their actual value.
No, it doesn't. The use was popularized in Wealth of Nations (yes, the original) and it refers to, as the name implies, renting out land.
I buy land. Once I've done that, I extract wealth from the economy from the economy while putting nothing new in. There's a finite amount of land.
This contrasts with investing in businesses (which allows them to buy capital, thereby generating further wealth), work, and other forms of income which generate wealth for the economy.
In broad strokes, rent-seeking behavior is unproductive, while work, investment, etc. are productive.
> It normally refers to people extracting money for things far beyond their actual value.
That's not what "rent-seeking" means at all.
Rent-seeking is extracting wealth from a system without creating anything. It's a term meant to differentiate profiting via productivity/adding value (eg. manufacturing a better product and outcompeting others) and profiting via extracting value from others without adding anything (eg. buying out all of the manufacturers of a product and leveraging your monopoly position to jack up prices).
Amazon haven't created any value here - they own enough of a stock of a scarce, in-demand resource that they can charge a great deal for it. It's the definition of rent-seeking.
No you can't, because you can't actually acquire an ASN *block* to begin with.
Which is the point of my comment. Only the RIRs handle blocks of ASNs. As a non-RIR entity you can get individual ASNs, or multiple individual ASNs, but not an ASN block.
Even already, I think you can get away with doing almost everything v6 with a much smaller number of ipv4s for legacy traffic. I say that but still largely use v4 for everything, so maybe I'm not one to talk.
There's a collective action problem around IPv4 vs IPv6. Talking about Azure/Microsoft/GitHub and its lack of IPv6 support is very much an interrelated problem. It's ridiculous to think of noting downsides/trade offs as just kvetching.
Because for better or worse, those services are transforming the output. Arguably in not a very valuable way but they are transforming it nonetheless. Whether or not you find that transformation useful doesn’t change the fact it is happening.
IPs are IPs no matter what way you are cutting it. There is no other universal way to address internet resources yet (as adoption is still slow on ipv6), so this is rent-seeking in the same way a toll road on public roadway that has existed for 20 years is rent-seeking.
Edit: furthermore, in both of your examples you can just go to another provider or not use those services. If you are locked in to AWS, you HAVE to pay this price.
IP addresses are supposed to be free! The RIRs are in the business of handing out addresses to whoever applies for them if the applicant can show that they have a reasonable use for the addresses. But as the IPv4 addresses eventually run out, AWS will then buy addresses directly from whoever has them. This is allowed, but a bit dubious, since if someone aren’t using their addresses, it would make more sense to return them to the RIR to be reassigned. But if AWS owns all the addresses, and nobody can get any more, it makes sense for AWS to start charging for the addresses. It would also make sense for AWS to halt and delay any IPv6 adoption, so we should watch for that.
Not true at all you have apply for asn, you have pay for registration and ips seperately. Which needs to be renewed every year. Also you cant sell to anyone you want. You can transfer ownership but it goes through arin.
In reality, nothing can be free. The cost was initially not being paid for, because initially there's just quite a bit of addresses, and there wouldnt have been any quarrels.
I maintain that the world is being polluted because things aren't free. Imagine if every cubic inch of air, water and land is owned. You would not be allowed to pollute! You'd pay for your use of it!
Had AWS not gone around offering to beat any offered price for IPs things might be a lot more reasonable right now. You can't complain that you had to pay a ton for a scare resource when you were the ones throwing gasoline on the scarcity problem.
They even did backroom deals to steal large blocks of IP space, most notably from the HAM radio community.
AWS over the last decade has spent $ billions buying up ASN blocks.
I've never been one to use the word "rent seeking", but owning IPs is the ultimate rent seeking cloud business. Domain names can change registries but if you own the underlining IP being used (and there's a depleting supply of them) - it's a great business to charge rents on.
https://www.techradar.com/news/amazon-has-hoarded-billions-o...