Hi Robert, Thanks for the excellent perspective on this issue. I'll only make a few comments.

3. New entrants should not be disadvantaged (as they would be if we have one set of rules for NZGATE addresses) and should also be able to obtain provider independent addresses on terms no less attractive than existing operators enjoy.

For entrants who expect to need a reasonable amount of address space, there is little difference. The situation for those needing less is, unfortunately, difficult because small blocks of newly obtained addresses are unlikely to be routable. However, new entrants may be able to use NATs or otherwise build their systems to allow easy renumbering. The main problem for existing users is that changing can be difficult, expensive, and not commercially viable because few had anticipated a need to ever have to renumber (and the systems to make this easy were not available then).

4. Incentives to corporates in particular to relinquish unused addresses

This is an excellent idea. Perhaps all the incentives are already there (improved security, portability, future proofing, shorter outages from route flapping, etc). Perhaps we put together a readable document on the subject and distribute it widely. Providing incentives is certainly a much better approach than trying to coerce people into migrating -- and maybe we could get corporates to migrate without moving (resulting in more migration).

One of the elements missing here in NZ is the idea of a Local Internet Registry, see http://www.ripe.net/docs/ripe-159.html (which is kind of what I thought NZGATE was).

I think lots of others did too, including APNIC. -Craig --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog