Curran argues that ARIN's needs assessment for IPv4 address allocations is valuable because it takes into account past allocations, historical rates of network growth and other important data. He says ARIN processes hundreds of requests per month and on occasion rejects a request because need hasn't been demonstrated.
However, Curran says that ARIN has had "no abandoned transfers" because of a buyer's failure to pass the needs assessment. Curran reiterates that ARIN supports legacy IPv4 address sales because "if we can get underutilized IPv4 address blocks into use, that gives people breathing room for the transition to IPv6."
One issue that everyone agrees upon is that legacy IPv4 address sales are going to continue to be a hot topic for the foreseeable future.
IPv4 trading "is going to be important for a long time because of the flaws in the dual-stack migration policy," Mueller says. "You don't save any IPv4 addresses until 94% of the world networks are on IPv6. At the rate people are going to IPv6, we're not going to be anywhere near that point for 10 or 20 years. We're going to be needing a lot of IPv4 addresses."
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