[arin-ppml] Clarification on "a block designated for that purpose"

[michael.dillon at bt.com]

> What prompted my OP was a few off-list comments/discussions 
> that I had.
> Some were saying that I was trying to create "classes", and 
> some "classful".

I suspected as much. I am opposed to the kind of knee jerk
reaction because it means that the people saying these 
things either don't know anything about IPv6 or else they
simply haven't taken the time to really think about the
topic.

> The terminology got me until I read your response. I would 
> like to see 'classes of networks' (documentation only), but 
> not 'classful networks'
> (ie hard boundaries).

Even hard boundaries would not be a bad thing if they are
boundaries around a very large numberspace with room to
breathe. For instance the /64 boundary is becoming harder
as some vendors are finding it beneficial to build a maximum
/64 prefix length into their hardware.

Also, when you have thousands of ISPs basing their filters
on some kind of ARIN classification of an address range,
to most people, that makes it just as hard as the class A
boundary was before CIDR.

Networking is not Democrats versus Republicans stuff or
commies versus capitalist running dogs. Anything that is
bad in the IPv4 world is only bad because of the context
that it is in, and in the IPv6 world, the context has
changed so radically, that you really have to evaluate
things from scratch before pronouncing something as bad
or good.

--Michael Dillon