Joe Abley wrote:
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.
As always Joe you make excellent points. My thinking here was that in the absence of further v4 allocations a very large trading country might consider that the internet was already broken and that allowing its citizens some access might be better than providing no access at all. Indeed one might speculate that the vast bulk of users in a very large country using a complex language of their own might not miss the english speaking world to any great extent. For those who found it a problem (international traders) legitimate v4 addresses could be allocated.
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.
Or the clout of a very large trading nation might be much more than that of a very small pacific rim country. Might not large corporates (eg telcos) be pressured by big countries into making 'special' arrangements, rather in the way China have dealt with Google?
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.
While people can readily access v4 space I agree there is no commercial reason to deploy v6. I've suggested on the policy sig that further allocations of v4 should be tied to (say) implementing v6, at least to some extent. The pressure to migrate need not be solely commercial for example the artificial (regulatory) 'drop dead' dates for the analogue cell phone network in Australia or as I recall the VHF TV network in the UK are excellent examples. A policy that links new allocations, or even retaining current allocations(?) to taking positive steps to migrate might well move us further and quicker than purely commercial pressures will. In some ways it's a bit academic as, like global warming, no one wants to give up their oil dependency until the last drop runs out of the bowser. Cheers, Bob -- Robert Gray bob(a)brockhurst.co.nz