AWS over the last decade has spent $ billions buying up ASN blocks.
I've never been one to use the word "rent seeking", but owning IPs is the ultimate rent seeking cloud business. Domain names can change registries but if you own the underlining IP being used (and there's a depleting supply of them) - it's a great business to charge rents on.
https://www.techradar.com/news/amazon-has-hoarded-billions-o...
Putting a price on IP address usage again is a mechanism to prevent squatting/hoarding a scarce resource.
But if you don’t want to “rent” IP addresses from anyone, you can still find blocks for sale. Last time I checked (last year) class C blocks were going for $15k-$20k.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/ec2-byoi...
What you have described is effectively a China-style ICP license[1]. Unless you are willing to give a big name cloud provider $x per month, you shouldn't be able to put a service on the internet?
A bit of pain will be necessary to finally get modern IP across the line of mainstream usage.
Is this valuable use of IPv4 space? I think yes.
That isn't one company's call, it's past time for the DOJ to step in.
You can't buy/sell/trade "ASN blocks". The only people handling "ASN blocks" are the 5 RIRs (APNIC, RIPE NCC, ARIN, AfriNIC and LACNIC) and IANA.
> owning IPs is the ultimate rent seeking cloud business
It also seems that your use of "rent seeking" doesn't match established use. It normally refers to people extracting money for things far beyond their actual value. The IPv4 market is working pretty well on a supply vs. demand price feedback loop, i.e. the prices are in fact just reflecting the scarcity of IPv4 addresses. The term "rent seeking" does not fit that situation.
You absolutely can sell ASNs or ASN blocks, just like you can sell IPs.
Want to sell an ASN? Ask the buyer for money. When the money is in your account/escrow, transfer the ASN to them. Get money. Sale complete.
But that’s besides the point, this has got nothing to do with ASNs.
No you can't, because you can't actually acquire an ASN *block* to begin with.
Which is the point of my comment. Only the RIRs handle blocks of ASNs. As a non-RIR entity you can get individual ASNs, or multiple individual ASNs, but not an ASN block.
No, OP used it exactly correctly. It's the textbook definition.
> It normally refers to people extracting money for things far beyond their actual value.
No, it doesn't. The use was popularized in Wealth of Nations (yes, the original) and it refers to, as the name implies, renting out land.
I buy land. Once I've done that, I extract wealth from the economy from the economy while putting nothing new in. There's a finite amount of land.
This contrasts with investing in businesses (which allows them to buy capital, thereby generating further wealth), work, and other forms of income which generate wealth for the economy.
In broad strokes, rent-seeking behavior is unproductive, while work, investment, etc. are productive.
That's not what "rent-seeking" means at all.
Rent-seeking is extracting wealth from a system without creating anything. It's a term meant to differentiate profiting via productivity/adding value (eg. manufacturing a better product and outcompeting others) and profiting via extracting value from others without adding anything (eg. buying out all of the manufacturers of a product and leveraging your monopoly position to jack up prices).
Amazon haven't created any value here - they own enough of a stock of a scarce, in-demand resource that they can charge a great deal for it. It's the definition of rent-seeking.
Both are dominating the internet-cyberspace and both are screwing it over for everyone else.
VPNs just resell internet under a “more private than the next” unverifiable claim, and hope they get enough sycophants believing it
Most of YC this year resells access to ChatGPT
Its the game
Edit: furthermore, in both of your examples you can just go to another provider or not use those services. If you are locked in to AWS, you HAVE to pay this price.
I'd say that VPN is a way for Internet to work around artificial obstacles.
just like the air is supposed to be free!
In reality, nothing can be free. The cost was initially not being paid for, because initially there's just quite a bit of addresses, and there wouldnt have been any quarrels.
I maintain that the world is being polluted because things aren't free. Imagine if every cubic inch of air, water and land is owned. You would not be allowed to pollute! You'd pay for your use of it!
No one is saying that maintaining the fiber optics and routers should be free though, that's why we pay ISPs.
Also few legal documents needed to register.
https://www.arin.net/resources/fees/fee_schedule/#registrati...
They even did backroom deals to steal large blocks of IP space, most notably from the HAM radio community.