Petermgreen - We actually agree in one sense: the goal is to make sure that the public *servers* have unique addresses. It's not very difficult for corporate and hosting firms to make their public web sites IPv6 reachable in addition to IPv6. We're not talking about 99% of the home users or servers internal to the corporate firewall, just the public servers. Once there's critical mass in dual-homed public web content, it's possible for fiber/cable/broadband carriers to connect customers with IPv6 and dynamic IPv4 NAT for the remainder of the content.

RLH - Excellent points. Presently, the theory is that if you've got unused address space, you should return it so that other organizations that have need can be assigned it. This actually has happened (again, http://blog.icann.org/2008/02/recovering-ipv4-address-space/) but realistically, may not be the most popular route. In 2009, the community adopted a transfer policy which allows one party to transfer their address blocks to another (and be compensated independent of ARIN) but the receiving party has to prove the documented need to receive it. Since there's still addresses in the free pool, there's not a lot of reason for someone to pay when ARIN will provide them directly the same space once they've documented their need. FYI.

Transfers outside of the community adopted policies are fraud, report them here https://www.arin.net/resources/fraud/ and watch the resources be reclaimed. To the extent that you think the policy should/should not be changed, then get involved on the ARIN public policy process https://www.arin.net/participate/index.html. /John

DJB is correct, in that the IETF considered it outside their scope to do a "transition plan for the Internet"... This means that instead of having one standard model for how to get to IPv6, we've seen a veritable parade of transition and coexistence technologies. The combination of no clear transition plan plus no new end-user features makes deployment of IPv6 challenging, and I noted the same thing 15 years ago in RFC 1669. Despite all of the above, IPv6 remains the only viable answer if we want to keep growing the Internet.

We have been working on getting those with unneeded legacy blocks to return them, and have had some success: http://blog.icann.org/2008/02/recovering-ipv4-address-space/

You're correct... I'm careful to point out the uncertainty when doing the interviews, but reporters tend to lock onto the IPv4 depletion countdown number regardless...

Actually assignments from RIR's to customers are shown here:
<http://www.nro.org/documents/presentations/nro-jointstats_03-31-09.pdf>, on page 4.

This has been growing steadily, and was more than 12 /8 equivalents. This indeed is not "12 to 14", but shows that the reclamation of several 'Class A" addresses would still only give us more months, not years.

Done. Note that we've been averaging between 10 and 15 /8 blocks assigned per year in total space, which using very simply math against a total of 31 means we have a short number of years. If you'd like to see the actual assignment numbers and some more advanced models, go here: http://www.potaroo.net/tools/ipv4/index.html.

With respect to use of the 16 Reserved-for-Future-Use blocks, please review http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-fuller-240space-02; it is not certain if this space will be made available for public use or for private reserved use.

Yes, you can have the very same server answer IPv6 queries as well as IPv4, you just need to add IPv6 interface to the server and make sure the particular server software knows how to bind to IPv6 address.

The particular ISOC survey document which started this thread has a fairly long list of resources at the end of it which might be helpful, but here's a few to get you started: http://www.6diss.org/, http://www.getipv6.info/ and http://www.ipv6tf.org/

Quite possibly longer... IPv4 is going to be around for a long, long time; certainly in use in private and/or disconnected networks.

The important aspect of the transition to IPv6 is getting the public Internet resources using IPv6 in parallel with IPv4, as this allows continued growth of the Internet while reducing the amount of traffic that needs to accessed via NAT.

To the extent that one is operating a public server, it's time to be exploring adding IPv6 connectivity to it over the next two years. This is not difficult, but has some non-trivial security and management aspects which means providers of public-facing Internet servers need to start on this work asap.