Closure?

[bmanning at vacation.karoshi.com]

> As you may recall, I was one of the people who spoke up after Brian's talk
> at our last Public Policy meeting.

	Yup.

> Actually, I support the IAB/IESG recommendation, in general.  There are two
> aspects that trouble me, and I would like to see these made clear to the
> IAB and IESG:

	I think that they understand this.
> 
> 1) the recommendation is too glib in a number of its assumptions (see below).
> 
> 2) the IAB and IESG had jolly well better remember that, if we do this,
> there are few if any additional bits to be given away!

	Yes, many assumptions were made, often by people who have
	had little (recent) operational experience. You've got to
	start somewhere.

	To counter... We "redesigned" IPv4 a couple of times during
	its life expectancy.  I think that there is still enough 
	"headroom" to fix the "bit exaustion" when we get further
	operational experience. 

> >  - We are highly confident in the validity of this analysis, based on
> >    experience with IPv4 and several other address spaces, and on
> >    extremely ambitious scaling goals for the Internet amounting to an
> >    80 bit address space *per person*.  Even so, being acutely aware of
> >    the history of under-estimating demand, we have reserved more than
> >    85% of the address space (i.e., the bulk of the space not under the
> >    Aggregatable Global Unicast Address (TLA) format prefix).
> >    Therefore, if the analysis does one day turn out to be wrong, our
> >    successors will still have the option of imposing much more
> >    restrictive allocation policies on the remaining 85%.
> 
> If we reach this scenario within our childrens' lifetime, we will have failed.

	Then the developers of IPv4 failed. IPv6 should be such a 
	success disaster... :)

> The assumption that this migration entails only the implementation of new
> allocation policies is flawed.  Much of the deployed gear -- perhaps most
> of it -- will break if this happens.

	Allow me to trot out a varient of O'Dells law.  
	"The installed base is insignificant."

> Again, the recommendation is probably workable.  I am worried about the
> underlying overconfidence.

	I agree, its a bit a the cheeky side but I can see how it can 
	work and give us some room to stretch. Given that ARIN is the sole
	remaining holdout, it might be easier to kowtow now, with reservations
	noted and then collect enough empirical data to beat the I* senseless
	with their lack of operational vision. :)

> My two cents,
> - Scott


--bill