[CPWG] **REMINDER** Meeting invitation: At-Large Consolidated Policy Working Group (CPWG) Call on Wednesday, 20 September 2023 at 19:00 UTC

[John McCormac]

On 19/09/2023 21:51, lists--- via CPWG wrote:
> (c) what guarantees are in place so that RIR IPv4 blocks assigned to 
> local ISPs are effectively held available, exclusively, for use by 
> present and future users and service providers IN THE AREA SSIGNED TO 
> THE CORRESPONDING RIR.
> Otherwise, ICANN will have to deal with an extra-territorial 'gray 
> market' in IPv4 addresses.  A point that will not have escaped the 
> notice of participants in the forthcoming IGF.

As Michele and Olivier have explained, Christopher,
The IPv4 addresses are finite and IPv6 has not yet replaced them.

At a more granular level, the country for an IPv4 address or even a 
range of addresses can be changed. This is often done for operational 
reasons such as a large multinational cable TV ISP owning a large range 
of addresses assinging addresses to their national cable TV operators. 
This often causes problems for services like Netflix and Amazon Prime 
when their IP detection lists aren't up to date.

Hosting service providers (HSPs) will often enable a customer to change 
the country location for their IP(s) if they are targeting the market in 
a particular country. Facebook, for example, relabels US IP addresses 
according to country market. Amazon also has multiple presences in 
various countries but ultimately most of its IP addresses are US ranges. 
The same happens with HSPs with data centres or servers in different 
countries.

The AFRINIC situation may be the basis for the question. The Seychelles 
IP space had been largely acquired and this has skewed ownership.

The Seychelles gTLD domain names and websites footprint by country is an 
extreme example of the issue.

This is what the Seychelles gTLDs footprint looks like when using the 
standard delegated lists of IPs available from the RIRs:

All gTLDs - Locally Hosted - Externally Hosted - gTLD Websites

303	2	250	3,294,444


This is what it looks like at a more precise level.

All gTLDs - Locally Hosted - Externally Hosted - gTLD Websites

303	2	250	4,192

The 'All gTLDs' figure is based on hosters associated with the country. 
That brings up another issue with splitting IP addresses over countries. 
Many hosting service provlders operate internationally and they have 
adjacent markets (Ireland/UK, Belgium/Holland, Belgium/France, 
Germany/Austria, USA/Canada etc). Restricting IP addresses to regions 
(as in Regional IP Registries) may look good on paper. The reality of 
how IP addresses are used and subnetted or allocated is complex. That 
said, AFRINIC's situation is a major issue. It is almost an example of 
the tragedy of the commons in that IPv4 addresses were initially freely 
available but now have acquired a monetary value due to their scarcity.

Regards...jmcc
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