Nick Hilliard wrote:
David Conrad wrote:
Suppose we fast forward to ~2011 and you've just been rejected by RIPE-NCC because they have no more address space to hand out whereas AfriNIC and LACNIC both have (at least) a full /8.
I'm curious: what do you think is going to happen?
As you note, the concept of "fairness" is a rather difficult notion. Neither 2008-03 nor 2007-09 are going to stop the inevitable squabbling that's going to happen: "It's not fair - they have a /8 and we don't have any. Waah!", or "I'm not going to share my /8 with you. No, you CAN'T HAVE IT! Waah! I'm going to tell on you!! Daaaaaddddyyyyyyy!"
The more general observation is that there is no objective concept of "fairness" in such a situation. So as we try and figure out what changes (if any) should be made to the current distribution framework within the time available the challenge is that we are never going to be able to make the increasingly finite pool of remaining IPv4 addresses comfortably encompass the continuing sequence of needs that are expressed in address allocation requests. So if the aim of such tweaks is to maximise "fairness" then I for one get lost pretty quickly in understanding precisely what that means. And if the challenge is to make the finite become infinite, then we are not exactly making good use of what time remains. It's not that I'm trying to belittle the various arguments here, but what appears to me is that there is a certain shuffling of perceived future cost burden here - it appears that many folk see no advantage in early adoption of IPv6 and indeed perceive it as a penalty and a cost, and are therefore wanting to secure their own future source of IPv4 resources with the attendant consequence of forcing others into a position of necessity to confront IPv6 deployment sooner rather than later. This is being played out within each RIR (large vs small allocation debates, for example) and across the RIRs with policy debates such as these. However, its not clear (to me) that there is any overwhemlingly "right" answer here, nor is it clear (to me) that with more time to cogitate and debate the issue that we'll come up with any such solution. What is clearer (to me) is that what we are lacking here is a general sense of confidence that we can make this transition operate efficiently, effectively and safely, and part of the fuel for this debate over the last /8 may be interpreted as a perceived reluctance to just get on with what needs to be done in terms of network and service engineering. My suspicion is that if we were more confident that we understand what transition really meant, in terms of engineering, products, services, infrastructure, business, competitive positioning, lines of supply, etc, etc, then this entire policy discussion over what remains in the IPv4 pool would perhaps be of lesser importance in the grander scheme of things Internet. Geoff (speaking entirely for myself, naturally!)