[CQ] It's time to give up the 44.x.x.x address block

[Bruce Perens]

I sent this to some influential Amateurs this morning.

     Bruce

Dear Fellow Amateurs,

You may have seen the news that Interop has returned its IP address 
block to ARIN. See
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/10/embargoed-interop-gives-back-a-months-worth-of-ipv4-addresses.ars 

This was done as a means of prompting other organizations that hold 
large, mostly-unused blocks - that means us - to return them now that we 
are approaching the exhaustion of available IPV4 addresses.

Amateur Radio holds a block of 16 million IP addresses that are mostly a 
relic of past operation. When TCP/IP over 1200 baud packet was 
interesting, the IP address pool was far from exhaustion and holding 
that block had no cost to the general public. Now, Amateur Radio is a 
very significant contributor to the problem of global IPV4 address 
exhaustion.

Obviously it is true that everybody must convert to IPV6. As Amateurs, 
technically competent and in complete control of our own networking 
infrastructure, this is an easy place for us to lead. It isn't so for 
the global internet. Commercial internet providers must struggle with a 
tremendous technically-naive user pool who must be guided through 
conversion or provided with address translation kludges that will cause 
service problems, routing hardware that can't be converted to IPV6, and 
a tremendous expense of converting all of this infrastructure and 
training users and their own staff that has come at a really bad time 
economically.

Thus, I suggest that Amateurs would be fulfilling their social duty to 
the public by returning an address pool that they no longer need as soon 
as possible, and leading in conversion of their remaining and future 
TCP/IP operations to IPV6.

This isn't like giving up a frequency band that will never be returned - 
equivalent IPV6 address blocks are available to us, and the IPV6 address 
space is astronomical in size compared to IPV4.

     Many Thanks

     Bruce Perens K6BP