Reading over many of these notes my observation is that many here are good at understanding the technical points of the proposals and throwing around 224/4 this and 127/8 that. Then the discussion mostly disintegrates into anecdotes with hands waving furiously, "my anecdote is VERY important!" What would be useful would be some attempt to quantify what those anecdotes are trying to express such as the costs and disruptions they imply. Something more like engineering or economics or engineering economics. Let's use a measure, "Cost And Disruption to the Internet's Infrastructure", call it the CDII. For example: 1. Proposing these address re-uses: CDII zero, other than the cost of endless discussion. 2. Writing them down into revised standards: CDII zero, other than the effort to agree and write them down. 3. Deploying an experiment: CDII about zero one hopes, again other than keeping "lab notebooks" and reporting back results. 4. Deploying wider, voluntary usage: CDII larger as this begins to require changes in, for example, actual routing, firewalls, etc in the wild and may begin to affect those not intentionally involved. 5. Full implementation: Still voluntary of course because everything is. But this might be the point where someone requesting IPv4 address space is assigned a block in these re-purposed spaces. CDII grows. There are sub-threads implied for the various repurposed blocks with different CDIIs. Many seem to feel, for example, that re-use of 224/4 would have relatively low CDII, 127/8 perhaps a somewhat higher CDII, etc. What's the detailed list? What are the relative CDIIs? And there are devils in the details of quantifying CDII per se. For example CDII for infrastructure operators vs end users for a given deployment. But it's not totally open-ended or unknowable or, perhaps put better, not impossible to enumerate and make intelligent estimates. It's not a very deep or bushy tree. Just a few choices at each decision point with CDIIs assigned. Plus some attempt to aggregate those CDIIs and decide what is acceptable and what is not, thresholds. Plus time horizons and quantifiable measures of success and failure along the way. Something like this could be more productive than describing one's connected lightbulb or networking in Armenia one more time even if such anecdotes would form the basis for that quantification. Since this and similar discussions have been going on literally for decades maybe the time is past due to try to quantify something like this proposed CDII model. -- -Barry Shein Software Tool & Die | bzs@TheWorld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: +1 617-STD-WRLD | 800-THE-WRLD The World: Since 1989 | A Public Information Utility | *oo*