On Thu, 31 Aug 2000, Adrian Chadd wrote:
On one side you have pure business drives, on the other you have pure 'internet-good' drives. So far I haven't seen anyone suggest a useful middle ground.
The answer is quite easy, let the open market decide. Allow organizations or individuals to own address space by issuing titles to it. Organizations can then buy or sell address space according to their needs and the inherent value. All scarcity questions are answered easily, if you can't afford to buy more, then your business plan isn't working, possibly because you are using them inefficiently. Capitalism is a wonderful thing, it naturally distributes resources in a way that's much more equitable than any other artificial system. It solves the problem of organizations that are assigned much more address space than they need (GE would certainly sell off much of it's /8 if it knew it would get a bunch of money for it). New businesses could easily go out and buy exactly as much address space as they need and can afford. Worried about BGP table size because you're too cheap to buy more memory for your routers or are using old hardware? Fine, filter based on whatever metrics you want, some of us will make the investment to buy bigger and better routers and provide a more complete internet service than you and provide more value to our customers. As much as way too many people dislike it, the fact is that the Internet is a business now and has been for a while. There's just no reason that address space should be treated any differently than any other resource. Put it on the open market, let the market decide who deserves more space, let money, the only thing a business really understands, drive the technology to reduce consumption of address space. Someone who wants a static address, or non-NATed service should pay the costs associated with providing that service, the value of the address. Brandon Ross 404-522-5400 EVP Engineering, NetRail http://www.netrail.net AIM: BrandonNR ICQ: 2269442 Read RFC 2644!