Speaking from a (large) user organization. I am very concerned about having the ISPs performing address allocation, particularly aggregating addresses. As a user, I want to be able to change my service provider if I get a better deal from a competitor or am having service difficulties with my current provider. Today's technology for managing addresses on individual computers makes it very hard for an organization to renumber. Literally every computer administrator needs to be in the loop. This can be a large loop when you have 13,000+ independently managed machines (like we do).
How do we users get our say to ensure that an addressing architecture doesn't come into existence which tends to lock us into a particular provider?
The entire point behind CIDR was to allow flexible sized blocks of address announcements via BGP. The method of sending CIDR blocks to a provider should not have any direct relation to the provider's ability to handle "defections" of individual networks within the block. I understand your concern, but it really is pretty orthogonal to the problem of getting enough CIDR blocks to providers to start with... -george william herbert gherbert@crl.com