[address-policy-wg] Policy proposal: #alpha: TLD Anycast Allocation Policy

> If I've understood correctly, geographical addressing will lead
> to forced interconnection of providers in the geographical area

It would only be forced if geographical IPv6 addressing was
the only kind available. But if geo IPv6 addressing is offered
as an option, then market forces can sort out which way is 
better. To allow market forces to work, you would have to 
offer every company, both kinds of IPv6 addresses.

> but also of carriage of transit
> traffic destined to other providers' customers, i.e. you as a
> provider would be forced to shoulder costs with no way to recover
> them.

One would assume that if you interconnect with your geographical
neighbours for the purposes of exchanging geo-addressed traffic
then you would also work out a cost-sharing agreement of some
sort. As long as geo-addressing is optional, this type of problem
will not exist.

In the end we may find that geo-addressing dominates in some
parts of the world, where it suits their culture and communication
patterns. And the current random addressing dominates in other
parts of the world, such as the USA, where chaos is highly valued
in the culture. I don't see geo-addressing as a cure-all, just
an option that we should make available using the vast reserved
space in IPv6.

50 years from now the Internet will not be able to cope with
global routing table size using the existing random addressing
scheme because every small and mid-sized company will want to
be multi-homed. Multi-homing is something that people learn to
need when they see the disasters that happen to single-homed
companies. Over time, basically every organization will want
to be multi-homed in order to spread the risk. In fact, it may
become a requirement of many business insurance policies.

In a world where geo-addressing is widespread, a North American
ISP can have a single route for all of Europe. A small German
company can have geo-addresses, and be connected to three local
ISPs who all peer locally to exchange geo-addressed traffic. 
Any two of those three ISPs can go off-line and the small German
company will still be fully connected. 

We have enough knowledge of intercontinental cable routes
today in order to design a geographical aggregation topology.
There are unlikely to be any significantly new intercontinental
or overland paths that could not be predicted based on today's
knowledge. It would make an interesting university research
project to design such an addressing topology and I hope that
someone will take up the challenge. Until we have this kind of
work on the table to discuss, it is hard to prove that geographic
addressing will work or that it won't work.

--Michael Dillon

P.S. if anyone here is under the illusion that I am talking
about assigning IPv6 addresses to countries in the same way
as E.164 addressing, then you should check the difference
between geographical and geopolitical in the dictionary.