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 right solution is to add enhancements to the Internet protocol suite to either automate renumbering as much as possible or to decouple the routing and addressing system from endpoint identification (in general, end-systems need only the latter, and adding such indirection would allow the assignment of addresses to be fully automatic). Unfortunately, while doing this has been discussed for a long time, not a lot of progress has been made in implementing and deploying viable solutions. And to make matters worse, it would appear the next generation of the Internet protocol is likely to do this wrong as well, which means that while it may provide adequate numbering space for assign a unique identifier to every atom in the Universe, it may not solve the route scaling problem. --Vince