[arin-ppml] A modest proposal for IPv6 address allocations

[Milton L Mueller]

> 
> allocating based on need.
> 
> -- 
> Cheers,
> McTim

Perhaps. But "need" is subjective (as the old Hummer ads said).
Refer back to Leo Bicknell's post about how you define a "subnet" a few days back. Lots of games can be played with that. 
To eliminate the games, you standardize, but that has its own problems. RFC 3177 has already decided that every cellphone "needs" 18,446,744,073,709,500,000 host addresses. That, patently, isn't true; many thousands of trillions of addresses will be wasted because end sites don't need them. 
Making finer distinctions requires massive investments in organizational overhead: reviews, monitoring, etc. It might be better to calibrate cost with consumption in some way. That might make people conserve properly. But that has its own problems, too. 

Milton Mueller
Professor, Syracuse University School of Information Studies
XS4All Professor, Delft University of Technology
------------------------------
Internet Governance Project:
http://internetgovernance.org
 

> "A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A
> route indicates how we get there."  Jon Postel
>