On Wed, 11 April 2001, Dave Crocker wrote:

Early IPv6 work explored use of geography-based addressing, but rejected it essentially because it would require more localized provider interconnections than existed, or else it requires some rather bizarre routing information exchanges.

Network chickens and eggs. The telephone system has tandems in every LATA because the network architecture requires it, or the network architecture developed because there was tandems in every LATA? International country codes are assigned by country because there was only a single PTT in each country, but now there are several companies. Is the lack of localized provider interconnections an accident of the Internet architecture or a requirement? Are other network architectures really bad, or has the current architecture driven the protocol development which in turns reinforces the same limitations of the current architecture? If you assign CIDR blocks by provider, and multi-homing becomes the norm, things grow worse on the global level. If you assign CIDR blocks by geography, and multi-homing becomes the norm, things grow worse on the local level. Which is worse for the global network, ugly local problems or ugly global problems? We seem to go through the same circle every time. People built the current network around the current limitations of the protocol. If we changed the protocol, perhaps folks could build a different architecture around its limitations. If we had an aggregation strategy which supported aggregation at the region/state/city level, perhaps network architecture would be built the same way.

Still, being able to avoid the tyranical capture effect imposed by provider-based addressing, AND getting better route aggregation, sure does make geography-based approaches appealing.

If only someone could work out the technical kinks...

Necessity is the mother of invention?