Bill, On 20.11.21 21:37, William Herrin wrote:
On Sat, Nov 20, 2021 at 12:03 PM Michael Thomas <mike@mtcc.com> wrote:
Was it the politics of ipv6 that this didn't get resolved in the 90's when it was a lot more tractable? No, in the '90s we didn't have nearly the basis for looking ahead. We might still have invented a new way to use IP addresses that required a block that wasn't unicast. It was politics in the 2000's and the 2010's, as it is today.
That really isn't what happened. In 2008, Vince Fuller, Dave Meyer, and I put together draft-fuller-240space, and we presented it to the IETF. There were definitely people who thought we should just try to get to v6, but what really stopped us was a point that Dave Thaler made: unintended impact on non-participating devices, and in particular CPE/consumer firewall gear, and at the time there were serious concerns about some endpoint systems as well. Back then it might have been possible to use the space as part of an SP interior, but no SP demonstrated any interest at the time, because it would have amounted to an additional transition. Eliot