On 14-Feb-2007, at 13:35, Robert Gray wrote:
Jamie Baddeley wrote:
Given the deafening silence I'm going to provoke some debate. Just for fun :-)
Debate on this subject is very important as the policy proposal suggests "the exhaustion of IPv4 address space is expected to take place as early as within the next five years".
Imagine a world where there are no more allocations of v4 space. How would this affect your business and customers?
There's a slight non-sequitur in your phrasing, there. If the RIRs have no more address space to assign or allocate, that doesn't mean there are necessarily "no more allocations of v4 space"; it might just mean that you stop shopping for address space at APNIC, and start buying on eBay.
What if a large country with a huge population, an independent outlook on the world and vast growth in internet usage (mentioning no names) was denied more allocations and simply decided to recycle someone else's /8's as there's "nothing our people need to see in there".
Such large countries are often responsible for prodigious international trade; it's not obvious that disabling lines of communication would benefit that trade, so perhaps that would be a disincentive to such practices.
What if this was 202.0.0.0/8 or 203.0.0.0/8, or both. Could that happen? If so how badly do things get broken?
There's a difference between internal-use addressing and globally- unique addressing. If a large carrier decided to claim something like 202/8 or 203/8 for their own and attempted to announce them (in whatever small chunks were required to win their traffic) we might reasonably expect their peers and transit providers not to accept and propagate the announcements. That limits the usefulness of such hijacking.
Seems to me doing nothing (in this case not even rearranging the deck chairs) is not a good option but it looks like the one that will be taken unless there is agreement on a better plan. This policy proposal needs some more debate and who better that nznog members to 'stir it up' :)
The cynic in me (hey! that's all of me!) says that IPv6 is the answer, but that until the cost of deploying IPv6 exceeds the cost of struggling on with IPv4, everything will be business as usual. This further suggests to me that we have at least ten years of intense lawsuits and shouting to go before I can go IPv6-only. Joe