Ok so this turns NANOG into Big-Internet... mutter... but it's more interesting than television, and people here really ought to be thinking about things like this anyway. Oh yeah, I just realized I can add an ob. ops. postscript. So there. Nyah. Michael Dillon <michael@priori.net> writes:

If you use NAT and renumbering technologies then you don't give a darn what your IP address is or who gave it to you as long as it is globally routable.

No, all you care about is that two endpoints can talk to each other. You emphatically must NOT care what your IP address is, as you say, but this also means that you must not care about the scope of the address itself, nor about the scope of its routability. In any piece of the evolving Internet, a datagram may undergo transformation from one address to another. In some cases it may undergo transformation into a prefix which is expressly not globally routable (e.g., an RFC 1918 address), yet which is routable within the scope of the address's visibilty. That is, between any pair or cluster of NATs (for instance, at the edges of a network) you require routability of all addresses valid within the scope delineated by those NATs. Outside that scope, the addresses (and indeed the protocol(s) under the end-to-end protocol) may be undefined.

Routing problems involve how to design, manage and operate this internal traffic distribution hierarchy and are essentially engineering problems, not policy problems or social problems. I think that the desire for portable address space is not a routing problem.

PI space is already being remapped by NATs around the world; the next steps in the evolution of the Internet seek to push that remapping closer to the edge of the PI space, so that the PI addresses ultimately are visible only within the administrative scope of the user of the PI addresses. This done, the whole PI vs PA address argument will simply cease to be relevant, and the principal flaw of the post-CIDR IPv4 addressing scheme will be no more. Note that scoping address meaning within a subset of the global topology also increases the address lifetime of IPv4 itself substantially, even ignoring such things as overloading single addresses and the like. The one piece that is unfortunately missing is more an API issue than anything else, and that is that getservbyname(3) should take an FQDN as a third argument and should find its answer in the DNS rather than in /etc/services (hi Paul). Sean. P.S.: The neat thing about this is that suddenly no operator really would need to worry much about ARIN and addressing politics, since addresses would only be valid within paritcular scopes, which could be the individual provider or a collection of providers, with or without downstream customers. (I hope there is no operator who thinks that killing off silly addressing politics and the endless arguments about filtering and so forth would be a Bad Thing.)