[ppml] 2005-1:Business Need for PI Assignments

[Lea Roberts]

dear Randy -

thanks for a very thoughtful (and thought-provoking) rant (and don't
forget to </rant>  :-).

I hope we can come up with some criteria that will break the current
log-jam while being as careful as possible.  I hope (and am fairly
confident) that you will continue to provide your viewpoint on our
efforts.						/Lea


On Wed, 20 Apr 2005, Randy Bush wrote:

> <rant>
>
> *nobody* likes to renumber, end users, isps, ...  and some of us
> speak from serious experience doing so.
>
> no organization wants to rely on any other organization for their
> address space.  when viewed through very small glasses, it makes
> perfect business sense.  end sites don't want to rely on isps.
> isps would prefer not to have to go through the rirs.  rirs would
> prefer not to go through iana.  and the iana does not want to be
> responsible to anybody.  all nice, but give me a break.  this is a
> global network; wear larger glasses.
>
> the promises of easy renumbering etc. in ipv6 were total bs.  the
> promises of routing table limitation in ipv6 have turned out the
> same.
>
> no one who has been around the block is willing to bet one bowl of
> ugali that the ivtf or anyone else is going to come up with routing
> and multi-homing magic in the next five years.  some of us doubt
> the problem will be solved at all usefully for real operations for
> far longer than five years, though we would dearly and desperately
> love to be proven wrong, and are contributing to the effort to
> prove ourselves wrong.
>
> no one actually knows, in a measurement sense, the elasticity of
> the global bgp routing system.  but folk who are responsible for
> budgets, engineering networks, and deploying routers do know that
> being able to have enough horses to haul the load is having a
> serious impact on capex, and are not made happy at the thought of
> rampant routing growth on either their margins or on the technical
> stability of the internet.  those of us with grayer and/or less
> hair have actually seen real global routing crashes, and don't want
> to explain them to the nyt, dhs, or clueless power grabbers in
> well-cut suits again.
>
> folk actually measuring ipv6 deployment know that the actual *use*
> of ipv6 is negligible at best, in north america, south america,
> europe, africa, oceania, and asia all rolled together.  read the
> previous sentence again, actual use of ipv6 is negligible at best.
> likely there are more ipv6 address assigned than there are packets
> pushed in a day.  it's still research lab stuff.
>
> and we all know in our black little hearts that the most
> significant factor in this is that ipv6 does not really offer the
> u$er anything that they can perceive sufficiently to spend money to
> start moving actual use or operations to v6.  the end user does not
> know or care about address space, renumbering, nats, ...  they just
> want their mtv, and are only willing to pay $19.95 a month for it.
> in a sense, this is good, users should not have to care about all
> the stuff we have to care about; you should not have to be a
> mechanic to drive a car.
>
> sure, we need to allow folk who really need and can justify (e.g.
> see drc's msg of earlier today) end site allocations to get them,
> both in v4 and v6, and in a consistent manner [ note that i have
> been pushing micro-allocation in ipv4 for many years, with long and
> strong resistance from cjw, and other folk now becoming more
> liberal in the v6 world ].
>
> but, as no one has yet to come up with any of the promised magic,
> we really have no basis to predict the future other than some
> epsilon off the lessons of the past.  and some of those lessons are
>   o routing tables do make global messes when not treated with
>     prudence and conservation.
>   o when there is user and business incentive to do so, sites,
>     isps, users, ... will go through the pains of dealing with
>     rirs, provider space, ...
>   o it is hard to find a good compromise in this space, but we have
>     to do so, and have been doing so for a long while; do not
>     panic.
>   o but imprudent blow-out of any one (or more) of the dimensions
>     in tension, at the expense of the others, will lead to articles
>     in the nyt, wsj, and people who wear strange clothes.
>
> this is not easy.  there are no simple answers of which i am aware.
> and progress will not be fast, certainly not enough to be a
> marketing force for ipv6.  but, history tells us that if we are not
> careful, we pay big-time in the long run.
>
> randy
>