Owen DeLong wrote:
I have never been a fan of the registered ULAs, and have argued against the IETF's attempts to state specific monetary values or lifetime practice as a directive to the RIRs; but I am equally bothered by the thought that the operator community would feel a need to fight against something that really doesn't impact them.
Perhaps it is because in the perception of the operator community, we do not believe it will not impact us. The reality is that once registered ULAs become available, the next and obvious step will be enterprises that receive them demanding that their providers route them. Economic pressure will override IETF ideal, and, operator impact is the obvious result.
This argument is basically saying that the RIR membership knows it is forcing allocation policies that are counter to the market demand. The only way ULAs could be considered for grey market PI use is due to lack of any alternative mechanism to meet the real customer requirement for independence. The current problem is that the RIR membership has self-selected to a state where they set policies that ensure the end customer has no alternative except to be locked into their provider's address space. Everyone acknowledges that the demand for PI space is real while simultaneously refusing to seriously deal with it (and the re-architecting of fundamental assumptions about the Internet effort of multi6, while serious, is not a short term solution). My to-do list for the next couple of weeks has an item to ask for a BoF at the next IETF on an interim moderately aggregatible PI approach. I cc'd the Internet ADs since this is as good a time as any to start the process. I have a proposal on the table, but I care more about a real solution than I do about that specific approach. At the same time I continue to get comments like: 'Your geographic addressing proposal (draft-hain-ipv6-pi-addr-07.txt) is very attractive to us (it's pretty much ideal, really)', so it probably makes a good starting point for discussion. Tony