When wells run dry

Abstract

With the recent IPv4 address exhaustion, many networks can no longer rely on requesting additional IPv4 addresses space. They resort to new ways to obtain addresses: buying and leasing. In this paper, we first shed light on the recent economic trends of the IPv4 buying market by augmenting transfer statistics with public and private pricing information from four large IPv4 brokers. We infer the size of the IPv4 leasing market through two different data sources: routing information observed from BGP collectors and RDAP databases operated by the Regional Internet Registries. We find that neither of those sources alone is capable of estimating the full market size. We relate our findings to discussions with 13 IPv4 brokers and summarize how networks handle their demand for obtaining IPv4 addresses in 2020.

Heads in the Clouds? Measuring Universities’ Migration to Public Clouds: Implications for Privacy & Academic Freedom

“…Universities look towards cloud infrastructure as a way to reduce their own IT investments, and potentially even a chance to free up and monetize assets, e.g., IPv4 addresses [121,134]. While the use of specific tools may lead the university to enter into agreements with a multitude of companies, many of these tools themselves are hosted on one of the three largest cloud platforms: Google Cloud, Amazon EC2, and Microsoft Azure.…”