John - Like many others here and in private email, you make excellent points, and were influential in helping move towards allowing /19s in 206/8 on the grounds that many people honestly (mis-)understood comments about indecision with respect to /19s vs /18s and noises about possibly re-evaluating things in the future to be a guarantee of routability of /19s in the 206/8 range. I also agree with your points that encouraging the growth in the number of providers, particularly small providers, is very important to the evolution of the ubiquitous Internet, and that anything that holds back the growth of the number of small and mid-size providers should be avoided. Unfortunately, I don't think that we can adopt a policy of "should be avoided at all costs", because one such cost is having large segments of the Internet stop working. Consequently, there are a number of people at work on preventing further increases in the size of routing tables. While I do agree with Dave Crocker et al. that strict nonportable address allocation does make it difficult for small and mid-size providers to change connectivity to some degree, I believe that for the moment this is unavoidable, no matter that I wish that it was, or that I could put some of my efforts off any longer than I already have. However, with respect to the difficulties that inflexible minimum sizes on portable allocations (i.e., those that are likely to be routable throughout the entire Internet) and limits on routability of long prefixes, most things would be made much easier on small and mid-size providers if sufficiently good renumbering technology existed for small-i internets. Therefore I make the economic argument to workstation, operating-system and router vendors that it is in their interests to develop easy-to-use or (semi-) automatic renumbering tools for all their products, and to participate in the development of protocols that allow these tools to cooperate in the process of renumbering even sizeable small-i internets. I assert (wearing a price-theorist's hat) that such a technology will lower the costs of providing big-I Internet services significantly, and that this cost-savings will allow for a reduction in pricing due to competitive pressures, and, caeteris paribus, will lead to further growth of the Internet and consequently more sales of "Internet-ready" workstations, operating-systems, and routers. Sean. - -- Sean Doran <smd@sprint.net>