[ppml] IPv6>>32

> >We should leave this decision to the experts. And who
> >are those experts? The engineers of the future who
> >will have 10-20 years of IPv6 operational experience
> >are the experts I am referring to.
> 
> At which point the installed base will either be so large that
> the problem of inertial mass and potential inequities in distribution
> structures will effectively imply that any changes will be extremely
> tough 

Good!
I respect the skills of the people who will be on the
front lines in 20 years. I am happy that they have a tough
challenge and real problems to solve. I would hate to create
a future in which people don't need to think and solve
problems. At the same time, I know that another massive 
entrenched network is being transitioned as we speak and
the engineers of the future will have the benefit of that
experience.

In the UK we are beginning to transition the entire PSTN
voice network onto an IP/MPLS core network. This will be 
50% complete in 2008 and 100% in 2010. I expect that other
large PSTN networks will make similar transitions over the
next 20 years.

> While there is a temptation to leave well alone, from
> a public policy perspective we stand the risk of yet again visibly
> creating an early adopter reward and a corresponding late adopter
> set of barriers.

This is a much more important concern than conservation
or trying to reach perfection. I agree that the early
adopter reward should be minimized and that is why I
support adjusting the HD ratio and even capping the
size of a single allocation to force the very large
networks to return to the RIRs after the early adopter 
stage and after we have more experience.

> I suspect that we have already exhausted any
> tolerance we may have enjoyed in the past on this type
> of behaviour and there is a strong impetus on the part of many
> developing populous economies not to see such a precise rerun
> of what they would call previous mistakes. This is not an abstract
> concept but one where we are already seeing proposals from
> the ITU-T to establish an alternative address distribution system
> that is based around this particular concern.

I believe that these types of concerns from developing
economies can be alleviated by introducing geographic
addressing that takes the RIR continentally aggregated 
addresses of IPv4 to another level or two of detail. In 
addition because that, in effect, creates a competitive
market between the two addressing systems, I think we can
alleviate the concerns that address policy is being
created in an ivory tower.

--Michael Dillon