[ppml] My view on IPv4 (was: Re: IPv4 wind-down)

[michael.dillon at bt.com]

> I think the US is the only country where a large number of 
> people would 
> consider a "Internet" that only works within their country to 
> "work"  -  Even then, we are largely talking about the MySpace 
> demographic.   Anyone that uses any but the most popular open-source 
> software is heavily dependent on global connectivity.

I disagree. For instance Russia, a country which I am familiar with
having travelled there three times. Outside Moscow and St Petersburg,
few people speak a foreign language well enough to use it. For those
people, if a site isn't in Russian, then it practically does not exist.
Of course, there are some business interests that need international
connectivity, but please notice, I did NOT suggest that people would
give up their existing registered addresses. What you are likely to see
in countries like Russia is a two-tier Internet, where businesses and
government agencies that need global connectivity continue to use
registered addresses, but consumer services, and small business
services, expand by borrowing addresses from ARIN's whois. 

And the same is likely in many countries, like China. Since IP
addressing and other "Internet" issues like domain naming, are not
government regulated ( or only lightly) it is easy for governments to
look the other way when local business start using your address space.

In today's world, that kind of action is seen as antisocial, but in a
world of IPv4 exhaustion, the view changes.

--Michael Dillon