John, On Oct 2, 2007, at 3:57 PM, John Curran wrote:
At 3:15 PM -0700 10/2/07, David Conrad wrote: "Just have faith that'll all work out" is perfectly reasonable when comes to calling a hand in a poker game, but it's an irresponsible approach for us to take on maintaining one global Internet.
To paraphrase Bill Manning, can you point me at the "one global Internet"? a) We've already broken that (see IPv6 and/or NAT). b) Last I looked, the Internet was an interconnection of private networks generally based on IP, each with their own policy regarding what is accepted or not accepted for routing. But you know this. I am somewhat surprised that you believe a multi- billion (if not multi-trillion) dollar industry is simply going to throw up its hands at the first signs of a market, but perhaps you have information I do not.
Realistically, I suspect there are less than 100 /8s that fall into the category of address space whose terms of use are sufficiently ambiguous that they are likely to be traded. Rounding up, assuming those /8s are all shattered down to /24s (won't happen of course since ISPs will want to get the largest aggregates they can, but for sake of argument...),
Hold on here... uniqueness is the desired property for the vast majority of potential holders of those address blocks,
Actually, I suspect the vast majority of potential holders of addresses don't care all that much about uniqueness. They care about being able to reach the content and services they're interested in. As such, NAT (and hence non-uniqueness) is a perfectly workable solution for them. For the tiny subset that actually want to provide services, uniqueness is generally a pre-requisite, but what percentage of the IPv4 address space is used to provide services?
and they have no particular reason to respect your imaginary /24 boundary.
My imaginary boundary? Interesting. You are asserting that ISPs are going to start accepting prefixes longer than /24, particularly in the face of the FUD spread about how everybody's routers are going to turn to slag? Why would they do this?
FYI - there isn't an ISP out there who won't go along with that, allow the customer to "bring-your-own IPv4" block and attempt to route it when it means the difference between adding a new customer or turning them away.
Of course. However, the fact that someone announces a prefix does NOT mean every ISP on the planet, particularly those with old, memory limited routers must accept that prefix. Again, we've been here before. You and I both have the t-shirts. What happened when routers started falling over circa 1996? Why do you believe things will be different this time? Presumably you have a reason.
Does your market model prevent fragmentation?
Nope. Fragmentation will occur. The question is to what level. Why should an ISP go in and modify its existing prefix length filters in order to gain routability to somebody else's new customer? If an ISP does not have prefix length filters and it begins to see resource constraints in its routers, why should an ISP not deploy prefix length filters corresponding to what has been traditionally assumed about reasonable maximal prefix length? If you were actually worried about an explosion of routing information, I'd think you'd be campaigning for greater implementation of prefix length filters on the legacy /8s that are likely to be the first entrants into a free for all. I find it a bit strange that instead, you're going around proclaiming the sky is going to fall in various odd ways.
If you want to say "the market will figure it out", that's okay too... (but *that* is the path with the highest uncertainty and doubt of all, so don't be surprised if a folks ask for a little more certainty before they bet their livelihood on faith)
Certainty? Didn't know routability rated up there with death and taxes. I've asked several times, but have yet to see a concrete answer: What is your proposed alternative to a market in IPv4 addresses and, more importantly, how are you going to enforce it? Regards, -drc