We understand that having 240/4 reclassified as public space for assignment/allocation by RIRs will take some time and we are not expecting it to happen overnight. Having it reclassified as unicast space is indeed much easier. The Linux kernel already supports this (thanks Dave Taht), Windows is a "Patch Tuesday" away, and many hardware vendors can enable support for 240/4 with a minor firmware revision if they already do not.

With that, comes the argument - what about legacy hardware that vendors no longer support, or are out of warranty and no longer receive software updates? There are a few ways this could go, either network operators replace their equipment with equipment that supports this space (and grants allocated for organisations in LDCs who may have issues with funding equipment replacement) or hardware vendors release a special public firmware update that only addresses this change in routability which is exempt from support contract requirements (resulting in less equipment from being scrapped).

On Tue, Feb 13, 2024 at 2:03 AM Christopher Hawker <chris@thesysadmin.au> wrote:
> [Note: I have cross-posted this reply to a thread from NANOG on
> AusNOG, SANOG and APNIC-Talk in order to invite more peers
> to engage in the discussion on their respective forums.]

Chris,

Do not cross-post lists. Many of the folks who want to discuss are
only subscribed to one of the lists and thus cannot post to the
others. This inevitably results in a disjoint and confusing set of
posts with replies to messages for which the originals didn't make it
to the local list. If you want to discuss something on multiple lists
with multiple audiences, start a separate discussion on each.

Honestly, how can you not know this. It's only been mailing list
etiquette for decades.

> we feel it is appropriate for this space to be reclassified as
> Unicast space available for delegation by IANA/PTI to RIRs
> on behalf of ICANN.

That is probably unrealistic. Getting 240/4 reclassified as unicast is
at least plausible. As you say, there's no residual value in
continuing to hold it in reserve. The opportunity cost has fallen near
zero. But before anybody with a clue is willing to see it allocated to
RIRs for general Internet use they'll want to see studies and
experiments which demonstrate that it's usable enough on the public
Internet to be usefully deployed there.

Regards,
Bill Herrin

--
William Herrin
bill@herrin.us
https://bill.herrin.us/