John Gilmore wrote:
Tom Beecher <beecher@beecher.cc> wrote:
*/writing/* and */deploying/* the code that will allow the use of 240/4 the way you expect While Mr. Chen may have considered that, he has repeatedly hand waved that it's 'not that big a deal.', so I don't think he adequately grasps the scale of that challenge. From multiple years of patching and testing, the IPv4 Unicast Extensions Project knows that 240/4 ALREADY WORKS in a large fraction of the Internet.
And this is without the removal of reserved status. There is no real reason to think it would not have been practically universal if that had happened a decade ago.
Today Google is documenting to its cloud customers that they should use 240/4 for internal networks. (Read draft-schoen-intarea-unicast-240 for the citation.) We have received inquiries from two other huge Internet companies, which are investigating or already using 240/4 as private IPv4 address space.
240/4 becoming a de-facto super rc1918 in its totality is actually a net-loss. Has 240/4 been unreserved for potential global internet purposes a decade ago, much more constructive purposes could have been standardized as well. So all the delay is not a "no harm no foul" situation.
In short, we are actually making it work, and writing a spec for what already works. Our detractors are arguing: not that it doesn't work, but that we should instead seek to accomplish somebody else's goals.
John
At this point, its more like you have publicly accepted all the blame for the current incomplete state of IPv6 by acknowledging that you chose to take on the daunting task of 240/4 and refused to direct yours and everyone you knew efforts into IPv6, which was missing only that. Joe