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!" Of course, I don't want to trivialise the problem - it is rather a serious one. But fair is generally perceived as fair for someone when they benefit more from the arrangement than anyone else. Otherwise "fair" is not remotely fair. Perhaps "fair" just means what we want it to mean at a particular point in time, and from the point of view of deciding on a end-game v4 address pool distribution strategy, what we define as "fair" now may not be perceived as fair when one's local RIR runs out of addresses. I have a preference for 2007-09 over 2008-03 - at least the former has the advantage that the RIR exhaustion dates are more-or-less simultaneous worldwide, which is equally (in)equitable to all. RIR exhaustion will happen quickly and it will cause a shock, and then we'll just have to move on. As regards 2008-03, I'm not going to object to it, but I suspect it is more likely to cause protracted disgruntlement in the future until every last block of address space has been allocated from all RIRs, and this could be a matter of a year or two. But there you go: the proposal is popular in all other regions and each RIR community is fully within its remit to hoist itself on its own petard. As a side issue, it will be interesting to see in a couple of years time whether the loudest complainers (whether end-user or LIR) in the v4 exhausted world will be those who have made the most preparations for depletion. Nick