[address-policy-wg] Is the time for conservation over?

Michael.Dillon at radianz.com wrote:
> 
> One area of address policy that is fairly consistent world-wide is the
> view that IPv4 address space is scarce and that the policy must
> be conservative, i.e. the policy must make conservation of IPv4
> addresses a high priority.
> 
> I don't think that's true anymore.
-snip-
> Therefore, I believe that all the RIRs should jointly do some research
> to establish a prudent date at which IPv6 will be considered to have
> reached critical mass so that there will be a significant migration of
> users from IPv4 to IPv6. Once we set our sights on this date we should
> set aside a certain amount of buffer in the IPv4 space, and then design
> our policy to consume the rest of the IPv4 space, not to preserve it.
> At the same time, this policy shift should be presented as part of
> a global IPv6 migration strategy because that is what it is.

It sounds a little bit contradictory to give away IPv4 addresses when
you want people to migrate to IPv6, doesn't it? One of the supposed
advantage of IPv6 is the as-much-as-you-can-eat approach to addresses
(at least on your local end).

So I think your proposal is seriously flawed and contradicts your
desired goal.

> In addition, I don't see any good reason to wait until LIRs come and ask
> for IPv6 space. It's not scarce and the vast majority of IPv4 LIRs will
> be deploying IPv6 sometime. So why don't we just give every single
> one of them an IPv6 /32 today. Instead of creating barriers to the
> adoption

The problem with IPv6 is that it doesn't fix any problems. When IPv6
was engineered it was done with (from today's perspective) wrong
assumptions about the goals to achieve. Think about multihoming for
IPv6 which is currently not possible (except for ISPs). And much more
stuff on the operational side.

> of dual v4/v6 networks as we are today, we should be facilitating the
> operation of dual v4/v6 networks. We need to create an environment
> in which the end user can choose whether to use v4 or v6 rather than
> constraining the end users with our v4-centric regulatory bureaucracy.

The end-user has no choice because the end-user is not able to make
any choice since he lacks sufficient knowlege to trade off the
(dis-)advantages of his choice. The choice is usually made by the
ISP and the applications the user wants to use. For them it's just
the Internet and not an IPv4 or IPv6 based transport network.

-- 
Andre